Robert B. Parker's Payback E-Book

Mike Lupica

• Herausgeber: No Exit Press
• Kategorie: Krimi
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021

Seitenzahl: 366

Beschreibung

In her latest thrilling adventure, PI Sunny Randall takes on two serpentine cases that converge into one deadly mystery. PI Sunny Randall has often relied on the help of her best friend Spike in times of need. When Spike's restaurant is taken over under a predatory loan agreement, Sunny has a chance to return the favor. She begins digging into the life of the hedge fund manager who screwed Spike over - surely a guy that smarmy has a skeleton or two in his closet - and soon finds this new enemy may have the backing of even badder criminals. At the same time, Sunny's cop contact Lee Farrell asks her to intervene with his niece, a college student who reported being the victim of a crime but seems to know more than she's telling police. As the uncooperative young woman becomes outright hostile, Sunny runs up against a wall that she's only more determined to scale. Then, what appear to be two disparate cases are united by a common factor, and the picture becomes even more muddled. But one thing is clear: Sunny has been poking a hornet's nest from two sides, and all hell is about to break loose.

Leseprobe

CRITICAL ACCLAIM FORROBERT 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

John (Ziggy) Alderman.

1

I was in my brand-new office over the PF Chang’s at Park Plaza, around the corner from the Four Seasons and a block from the Public Garden, feeling almost as cool as Tina Fey.

I’d just walked through the door that had Sunny Randall Investigations written on the outside, put on some coffee, sat down behind my rustic wood Pottery Barn desk. All in all, I was everything a professional woman should be, if you didn’t count the Glock in the top right-hand drawer of my desk.

There were two chairs on the client side of the desk, a small couch against one wall, and a table on the other side of the room that I used for painting when I needed to take a break from world-class detecting. It housed my pads and boards and a palette and all the other tools of a world-class watercolorist’s trade.

‘Forget about the gun,’ Jesse Stone said. ‘If somebody shows up and threatens you, just pull a paintbrush on them.’

‘What about the boxing classes you made me take?’ I said. ‘You should see how good my right hand has gotten.’

I had signed up for a half-dozen at the gym an old boxer named Henry Cimoli owned over near the harbor.

‘Here’s hoping you never need to throw it,’ he said.

Jesse. Chief of police, Paradise, Massachusetts. On-again, off-again boyfriend. Mostly on over the past year. I had given in and started calling him that, my boyfriend, just because I hadn’t found a better way to describe his role in my life. We were still together, anyway, even though we were mostly apart, our relationship having survived the virus. We were official, as the kids liked to say, even if we hadn’t announced it on Instagram, or wherever kids announced such things these days, in a world where they found everything that happened to them completely fascinating. Jesse and I had been as close as we’d ever been before the virus caused the world to collapse on itself. Now we’d once again grown more used to our own social distancing, and for longer and longer periods of time, him up in Paradise, me in Boston.

But still official, at least in our own unofficial way.

‘I feel like Jesse and I are happy,’ I said to Spike the night before, over drinks at Spike’s.

‘Low bar,’ he said. ‘For both of you.’

‘Come on,’ I said. ‘I’ve got a stress-free relationship going, money in the bank, my own office, I’ve still got Rosie the dog, I’ve even lost five pounds, not that you seem to have noticed.’

‘Just like a big girl,’ Spike said.

‘Not as big as I was five pounds ago,’ I said.

‘You also still have ex-husband issues,’ he said, referring to Richie Burke, still in Boston, still in my life as he raised his son from his second marriage.

‘Do not,’ I said.

‘Do so,’ Spike said.

‘You sound childish,’ I said.

‘Do not,’ he said. ‘Do not, do not, do not.’

Spike and I had been celebrating the fact that I’d finally gotten paid by Robert Magowan, who owned the second-biggest insurance company in Boston. Magowan had hired me to prove that his wife had been cheating on him. This I did, well over two months ago. Then he refused to pay, and kept refusing, until Spike and I had finally shown up at his office and Spike threatened to shut a drawer with Magowan’s head inside it. That was right before I handed Mr Magowan my phone and showed him the images of him in bed in a suite at the Four Seasons, park view, with Lurleen from accounting, and wondered out loud who’d win the race to the divorce lawyers, him or the missus, once the missus got a load of what I thought were some very artsy photographs.

‘You were only supposed to follow her,’ he said.

‘Well,’ I said, ‘to put it in language you can understand, I thought I might need additional coverage.’

He’d proceeded to transfer the money over speakerphone from an LA branch of Wells Fargo while Spike and I watched and listened.

On our way out of the office Magowan had said to me, ‘They told me you were a ballbreaker.’

‘Not like Lurleen,’ Spike had said.

I knew I could have handled Magowan myself. I’d brought Spike along just for fun. His, mostly. He’d gone through a bad time during the pandemic, nearly having lost Spike’s at the worst of it. But he’d come up with the money he needed at the last minute, thanks to a loan from one of his best customers, a young hedge-fund guy named Alex Drysdale, who spent almost as much time in the place as I did.

Spike still wasn’t back to being his old self, but threatening to kick the shit out of Robert Magowan, even if it hadn’t come to that, had made him seem happier than he’d been in a year. And more like his old self.

He was about to pay off his loan this morning, having invited Drysdale to the restaurant so he could hand him the check in person. The thought of that made me smile, just not quite as much as the memory of the ashen look on Magowan’s face when I showed him the pictures of him and Lurleen in one particular position that should have had its own name, like a new yoga move:

Downward dogs in heat.

The sound of my cell phone jolted me out of my reverie.

The screen said Spike.

‘Sunny Randall Investigations,’ I said brightly. ‘Sunny Randall speaking. How may I help you?’

‘I need to see you right away,’ he said.

His voice sounded like a guitar string about to snap. I realized I was standing.

‘What’s the matter?’ I said. ‘Something’s the matter. I can always tell.’

‘I just knocked Alex Drysdale on his ass, is what’s the matter,’ he said.

‘The guy who loaned you the money?’ I said. ‘That Alex Drysdale?’

‘I wanted to kill him,’ Spike said. ‘But I stopped after breaking his fucking nose.’

‘Spike,’ I said. ‘What the hell happened?’

‘He stole my restaurant.’

There was a pause.

‘Wait, let me amend that,’ Spike said. ‘I mean his restaurant.’

I told him I was on my way, ended the call, grabbed my leather shoulder bag, remembered to turn off the coffee machine, locked the door behind me, ran down the stairs.

I had started to believe that maybe God, at long last, had stopped being pissed off at everybody.

Obviously She hadn’t.

2

‘Payback really is a bitch,’ Spike said. ‘Only it turns out Drysdale’s the bitch.’

We were seated at the bar. Spike had a Bloody Mary in front of him so big it looked like a fire hydrant. He also had a glass filled with ice next to it, and would occasionally pluck out a cube and press it to his cheek. Spike said that after he hit Drysdale, the two guys with him – neither of whom, he said, looked like fund managers – hit him back. I knew how hard it was to get the better of Spike in a fight, even when it was two against one. But they’d managed.

‘At least you got your shot in,’ I said.

‘I even managed to get some good ones in on the extras from The Sopranos,’ he said, ‘before one of them kicked my legs out from underneath me and the other just kicked the shit out of me.’

‘Literally kicking you while you were down,’ I said.

‘My upper body is already starting to look more colorful than Pride month,’ he said.

Drysdale, he said, finally told them to stop; he didn’t want Spike scaring the customers.

‘Called them our customers,’ Spike said, and drank.

I asked then how Drysdale had done it, if he could explain it to me without trying to sound like Warren Buffett.

‘I’m too stupid to sound like Warren Buffett,’ he said. ‘I’m the one who let him pick my fucking pocket in broad daylight.’

Drysdale had been a regular at Spike’s from the time he turned it from a sawdust-on-the-floor to an upscale restaurant on Marshall Street that had become one of the hottest places in town, not just because of the food, but because of the bar crowd, which could include professional athletes and local TV personalities and politicians and the lead singer from Dropkick Murphys and young women from the modeling agency that had opened around the corner. Drysdale was good-looking, a big tipper, often came in with a beautiful woman or left with one. And was rich as shit. He finally became aware that Spike, even with the government loans and takeout business and furloughing of a lot of the staff, was about to shutter the place. So he offered Spike the loan that he needed at a two percent rate, on one condition:

He didn’t tell anybody about the terms.

‘I’m a one-percenter,’ he joked to Spike, ‘but let’s keep that two percent between us.’

Spike had been a business major at UMass. When Drysdale presented him with the document, he told Spike to ignore all the bullshit language about floating rates and warrants and even what would happen if Spike somehow still had to declare bankruptcy down the road, that it was all boilerplate stuff and would never come into play until maybe the next pandemic in another hundred years or so.

‘We’re friends,’ Drysdale said. ‘We could have done this on a handshake. But my lawyers are making me.’

Spike was one of the smartest people I knew, on every subject except maybe the periodic table. But desperation made him careless, and so did trust in what he considered a real friendship. The wolf was at the door and he needed his money, as he said, right fucking now.

‘Stay with me,’ he said, knowing I was often challenged doing the math on a dinner check with girlfriends.

I stayed with him, but barely, as he began to speak of floating rates and cash positions that Spike said he never could have met, the ones Drysdale had assured him he didn’t need to worry about. And interest coverage. And revenue targets for a business that had no chance to meet those until the pandemic was over. Spike never knew it, but by the time Spike’s started making money again, by the time he could finally see some daylight, it was too late.

‘But the only one who knew that, from the start, was my pal Alex Drysdale,’ he said.

Then Drysdale came through the door a couple hours ago with his bruisers and handed Spike his check back as soon as Spike handed it to him, saying he could keep it, he’d basically been in default on the loan from the beginning.

I said, ‘Are we getting anywhere near the bottom line?’

‘He now owns Spike’s is the bottom line,’ he said. ‘He even showed me the part of the agreement where he was entitled to a special dividend for what he called his “consulting” services.’

Spike put air quotes around consulting.

‘Consulting on what?’ I said.

‘Fucking me over,’ Spike said. ‘It was at that point that I dropped him. Cost me a bunch of my new Doppio napkins because of all the blood. I was actually hoping he might bleed out and my problems would be solved.’

Spike drank more of his Bloody Mary. I idly wondered if it was his first of the day. He rarely drank this early. But these were special circumstances. I was starting to think about asking him to build a Bloody for me.

‘You know what he said when I asked him why?’ Spike said. ‘He said it was for the same reason dogs lick their balls. Because they can.’

At that point, Spike said, Drysdale turned and walked out.

‘What am I going to do?’ he said.

‘I believe you mean what are we going to do?’

There was a flicker of light then in his eyes, for the first time since I’d arrived. Not much. A little. I was telling him what we both knew in that moment, that I was here for him the way he had always been for me. I was his wingman now. Just far cuter.

‘Have it your way,’ he said. ‘What are we going to do?’

I smiled at him. It was as big as I had. Trying to tell him that things were going to be all right, even if I had no idea how.

‘What the horny insurance guy said I did to him,’ I said. ‘We’re going to break this dog’s balls.’

3

Before I left I told Spike not to do anything stupid.

‘Don’t you mean more stupid than I already did?’ he said. ‘It would make me as dumb as a hamster.’

I told him I would call him later. He said if I couldn’t reach him that would mean he was passed-out drunk. I kissed him and told him we’d figure a way out of this. He said I was full of it, but that he still loved me. I told him I loved him more.

I was supposed to have lunch with Lee Farrell at the Legal Sea Foods across from my office. I hadn’t seen him for a few weeks, not since he’d caught the disappearance of a local social media sensation named Carly Meme that the cops were treating as a possible homicide. Carly had made a huge name for herself as an influencer, pushing products and places to people her age and getting paid handsomely to do it. It was just one more thing that made me feel old. I used to think influencers were guys like my friend Wayne Cosgrove at The Boston Globe.

To make things far racier in all media, it turned out that Carly Meme – real name Carlotta Espinoza – had been the girl-on-the-side for Jack Norman, the most powerful political consultant in the state and right-hand man and fixer for Carlton Miller, who owned half of downtown Boston and was in line to be the next treasury secretary, if you could believe what you read. Of course, Norman had been extremely married for the past hundred years or so. He hadn’t graduated to suspect yet, remaining the ever-popular person of interest, swearing that he had nothing to do with Carly’s disappearance, that he’d been nothing more than a mentor to her. I told Lee one day that I’d never heard not being able to keep it in your pants described as ‘mentoring.’

But when I called to make sure Lee and I were still on, I went straight to his voicemail. Got no immediate reply to my text. He had either forgotten or was too jammed up with the case.

With lunch taken out of play, and not feeling particularly hungry, I decided to do what I often did in moments of great uncertainty.

Go annoy someone.

The someone was Alex Drysdale, whom I suspected was enough of an arrogant asshat to meet with me, even knowing how close I was to Spike.

Drysdale had asked Spike, when he first became a regular, if it was worth taking a shot at me.

‘You can go ahead and fire,’ Spike told him. ‘But you’d miss.’

Alex Drysdale, at least for a few months, remained undeterred. He’d never pushed too hard, never made me feel uncomfortable or too close to being Me Tooey. Maybe it was because Spike was always close by. Or me having told him, when asked, that I did indeed have a gun in my purse and so knew how to use it. He’d finally given up, still acting shocked that someone he found attractive didn’t return the feeling.

One night, when it was just Spike and me and him at last call, Drysdale had said, ‘Well, at least you let me down easy.’

‘Dude,’ Spike said, ‘how can you be down if you were never up?’

I still had Drysdale’s office number in my phone to go with his cell number, because he’d given me both. I called the office number, told his assistant who I was. She put me right through. I asked if I could come by his office. He said to come ahead. There was no point in him asking why I wanted to see him or me telling him.

‘You’re not going to finally shoot me, are you?’ he said. ‘To be determined,’ I said, and he reminded me that his office was at One Financial Center.

‘Where else?’ I said.

4

One Financial Center was a glass-and-steel monstrosity next to Dewey Square. It advertised itself, for some bizarre reason, as the ninth-tallest building in town, but only if you measured by its ‘pinnacle’ height, as if there were any other measure for the eight taller buildings in Boston.

The Sale Riche Group had a small suite of offices on the fortieth floor. Out of forty-six. I knew enough French to know that ‘sale riche’ meant filthy rich. I was surprised at how few people I saw when I got off the elevator. Maybe I’d seen too many Wall Street movies. I spotted Drysdale’s name on the door, big letters, straight ahead of me.

The nameplate on his assistant’s desk said Gina Patarelli. She had a lot of thick black hair, dark eyes, olive skin, lot of eye makeup. A little done for my taste. But still pretty. I told her I had an appointment.

‘Aren’t you the lucky girl,’ she said, in a North End accent, fun in her dark eyes.

‘Relative to what?’ I said.

She lowered her voice and grinned. ‘Just don’t make any sudden moves.’

‘You been with Alex long?’ I said.

‘Only in Alex years,’ she said.

‘Like dog years?’

‘Woof,’ Gina Patarelli said. ‘Woof.’

‘What would he do if he heard you talking about him like that?’ I said.

‘Not one freakin’ thing,’ she said.

‘Are you sure you’re working for him and not the other way around?’ I said.

‘Nah,’ she said. ‘He just knows that I know enough to be dangerous. Between us girls.’

‘Everything he knows?’ I said.

Her answer to that was a flamboyant wink.

She buzzed him then, told him I was here, showed me into his office. Drysdale was behind his desk and didn’t get up. He wore a white shirt rolled up at the sleeves and a matching bandage across the bridge of his currently less-than-perfect nose. ‘Look on the bright side,’ I said. ‘If we were all still wearing masks no one would know you lost the fight.’

‘I lose the early rounds sometimes,’ he said. ‘But never the fight.’ He cocked his head slightly. ‘Was that supposed to be funny, by the way?’

‘Apparently not,’ I said.

It was always my default position in a mirth-free zone, which this clearly was.

‘I’ve got no beef with you, Sunny,’ he said after motioning me into the one chair across from him. ‘But I’m not changing my mind, if that’s what you’re here for.’ He grinned. ‘No matter how hard you try to persuade me.’

‘You wish,’ I said.

I’d worn a short, cream-colored skirt to go with a black sweater not as tight as it had been five pounds ago. I crossed my legs. Eat your heart out.

‘I’m not here to change your mind,’ I said. ‘I just want to hear for myself why you’d do something this lousy to this good a guy. And, additionally, why you waited this long to do it.’

‘Nobody’s stopping him from paying back the money,’ Drysdale said. ‘I’d told him that right before he sucker-punched me.’

‘He was about to pay you back,’ I said, ‘just at the original interest rate.’

‘Not to use a cliché,’ Drysdale said, ‘but he didn’t read the fine print.’

‘You’re the cliché, Alex,’ I said.

He leaned forward now. It was problematic, at best, trying to smirk around a bandaged nose, but Drysdale gave it the old college try. Stanford, as I recall him telling me when I first met him, without being asked, before getting his MBA at Wharton.

‘He made a monumentally bad deal,’ he said. ‘And that’s not on me. That’s on him. If he’d read the agreement properly, he would have understood that he’d practically breached most of the covenants as soon as the ink was dry. But when you’re about to go under, you don’t bitch that the life preserver is too tight.’

‘I imagine loan sharks say pretty much the same thing,’ I said.

He shrugged. ‘I am who I am,’ he said.

‘You can’t possibly need his restaurant.’

‘I don’t need it,’ he said. ‘I just happened to want it.’

He leaned back and folded his arms in front of him. Behind him was a view of just about everything except the northern coast of Maine.

‘I’d like you to reconsider,’ I said.

He laughed now.

‘Yeah, well, that would be a no,’ he said.

‘You’re sure,’ I said.

‘I am,’ he said. ‘Imagine how much I’m going to save in bar bills alone.’

I stood up.

‘Well,’ I said, ‘it’s not like I didn’t give you a chance.’

‘A chance to do what?’

‘The right thing, mostly.’

‘Oh, get the fuck out of here,’ he said. ‘And then give this up. There’s nothing you can do about it.’

‘Now, see, that is where you’re wrong,’ I said.

‘Really?’ Drysdale said. ‘What do you think you can do about it?’

I smiled and came around his desk and sat on the edge of it, close enough that I knew I’d made him uncomfortable, even though I knew he considered himself too much of a guy’s guy to act as if he were afraid of me. On top of that, I was showing a lot of leg.

‘Not think,’ I said. ‘What I know I can do. Which means, Alex, that I am about to get up into your shit and never get out.’

Then, before he could get his head out of the way, I leaned over and pinched his nose hard enough to make him cry out in pain. I would have told him he sounded like a girl, but why insult the sisterhood?

As I walked out the door, leaving it open behind me, he was yelling at me that I didn’t want to fuck with him. Over my shoulder, I told him that I just had.

As I walked by Gina Patarelli she whispered, ‘I think I may be in love with you.’

5

I had walked to One Financial Center from Spike’s and decided to walk back to my office from there. I tried Lee again, but got no answer. No surprise. Carly Meme’s disappearance, if it did turn out to be murder, might end up being the most prominent case of his career, and would give him even more standing in Homicide than he already had. It hadn’t been easy for him as a gay cop, especially at the time he’d gotten his badge, with the BPD about as enlightened on the subject as Falwell Jr. It still wasn’t easy. A good arrest on this case, after all the media face time he was getting already, would officially make him a star.

He was Spike’s friend, too. Despite my best efforts, I had never been able to make it more than friendship between the two of them. But I wanted him to know what had happened, even as he was working his case and I was just beginning to work mine. It was a shitty thing that had happened to Spike. A chance to help him – and take down Alex Drysdale in the process – made me feel the kind of rush of cop adrenaline that Jesse so often talked about, and I was sure Lee himself was feeling right now. It was a good thing. Catching people like the frisky Mr and Mrs Robert Magowan in the act was something I occasionally did to pay the bills. But something like this, making things right for Spike, or at least trying, was why I wanted to be a detective in the first place.

‘Your work doesn’t define you,’ my therapist, Dr Susan Silverman, said to me once. ‘It is you.’

‘I am capable of committed relationships,’ I said, sounding like a defense attorney and not a patient.

‘Not like the one with your chosen career, Sunny,’ she said. ‘You can feel passionately committed to it and still be alone.’

I took my time making my way back to Park Plaza, choosing not to turn this into a power walk, not while wearing my new Stuart Weitzman ankle boots. They were officially known as booties. I still couldn’t say that out loud without giggling. It was the second half of October by now, the temperature in the fifties today, one of those October days when you started to feel summer finally letting go.

As I was making the turn off Stuart I pulled out my phone and called my father.

He asked what I needed.

‘Can’t a girl just call her pops to say hello?’

‘Even in retirement,’ he said, ‘I still look for tendencies,’ then asked where I was. I told him. He said he’d just finished a dentist’s appointment on Chauncy Street and hadn’t had lunch yet.

Half an hour later we were seated across from each other at the Legal Sea Foods near my office, and I was telling him what had happened to Spike, and how I’d left things with Drysdale, and what I’d done to him before I left his office.

‘My girl,’ he said.

‘It was awfully immature of me,’ I said.

‘But how did it feel?’

‘Fucking awesome,’ I said.

‘The mouth on you,’ he said.

He wore a tweed jacket that I knew was nearly as old as the Old North Church, a zippered sweater that I’d given him for his birthday, tattersall shirt underneath the sweater. His hair had gotten a lot whiter in the last year and his step a little slower, even though he swore he was still walking his three miles a day. But he still woke up every morning thinking his day was somehow going to be full of adventure.

‘You need to talk to a lawyer,’ he said. ‘What about the redhead you don’t like from Cone, Oakes?’

He was referring to Rita Fiore, still the best criminal attorney in town.

‘I don’t not like her,’ I said.

‘Not what you said when you found out she’d had a little fling with Jesse back in the day,’ he said.

‘That was another immature reaction,’ I said. ‘But I’ve evolved since then.’

‘Sure you have.’

‘The problem is,’ I said, ‘Spike thinks it’s all legal.’

‘I’m sorry,’ Phil Randall said. ‘Is he now practicing law at Cone, Oakes?’

He took his spoon and dabbed some cocktail sauce on one of his oysters and then added just a drop of Tabasco sauce and somehow managed to look elegant as he ignored his tiny fork and just slurped the thing down.

‘Even if he wanted it, it’s not as if Spike can currently afford high-priced legal talent,’ I said.

‘You could always call your former client the gangster,’ he said.

He was referring to Tony Marcus. Tony hadn’t actually been a client when he’d asked me to find his missing girlfriend, and ultimately no money ever changed hands between us. Phil Randall still maintained it was a tomato-and-tomahto type thing.

He ate another oyster, and smiled.

‘A couple pimps, him and this Drysdale,’ Phil Randall said. ‘Even though Drysdale frankly sounds like more of a bunco artist.’

‘No offense, Dad,’ I said, ‘but you don’t hear a lot of talk about bunco anymore.’

‘The definition nevertheless remains the same,’ he said. ‘A confidence trickster.’ He looked down at the Caesar salad I’d ordered but had barely touched. ‘Can I have your anchovies?’ he said.

For those he used the tiny fork.

‘So what are you going to do, and how can I help?’ he said.

As much as I prided myself on being a modern and independent woman, I was also aware how many smart men I had in my life, and how often I leaned on them when there was trouble. Spike was always my first call, only now he was the one in trouble. I knew Jesse was always there for me. Richie, too.

And Phil Randall, forever.

‘I’m going to find out everything I can about this jamoke until I can find something I can use,’ I said.

‘Jamoke,’ he said, and smiled another elf smile.

‘I’m not saying that all money guys are like him, because I’m smart enough to know they’re not,’ I said. ‘But Drysdale acts like he gets to use another rule book.’

‘I believe it’s known as the tax code,’ my father said.

He’d long since finished his oysters. Now he just reached over and slid my plate across to him.

‘I saw something in him today that I’d missed when we were all hanging around Spike’s,’ I said. ‘Maybe he just wasn’t important enough for me to notice. But he likes this. He likes wiping the floor with Spike this way. I felt like I was listening to a banker laugh his ass off about a foreclosure.’

‘He does sound like one of your gangster friends,’ Phil Randall said. ‘You’re coming at this in the right lane, kiddo. You treat him like a thief. A perp. He stole from Spike, whatever that piece of paper says.’

‘All he cares about is money,’ I said.

‘Find out about how he made his.’

‘I’m not even good balancing a checkbook,’ I said. ‘No one knows that better than you.’

He reached over and patted my hand. ‘But you’ve always been a fast learner, kid.’

He waved for the check then. I told him I wanted to pay, I’d just made a big score. He said I could get the next one, even though there never seemed to be a next one for me to get.

‘Find his secrets,’ Phil Randall said.

‘You’re sure he has some.’

‘Everybody has them,’ he said. ‘You just have to know where to look. And you will.’

‘You sound pretty certain.’

He smiled the elf smile again.

‘Genetically determined trait,’ he said.

6

This had quickly turned into one of those days when I longed for the old times about which my father constantly romanticized, when investigating bad guys involved walking up stairs and knocking on doors, not search engines and Google searches.

‘If I had ever known that a mousepad would be one of the tools of the trade,’ Phil Randall had once told me, ‘I would have reconsidered the priesthood as a vocation.’

‘Not what Mom says,’ I told him.

But by the end of the afternoon, I knew a lot more about Alex ‘Ace’ Drysdale and what a repellent financial whiz boy he was than I’d known before Spike’s phone call.

He’d grown up in Sausalito, played football in high school and then at Stanford, before coming east for the MBA. In one of the interviews he’d done, with the Financial Times, he said he might not have been the best student in his class at Wharton, but he’d gotten straight A’s in connections.

‘You know how you show how smart you are?’ he said. ‘By realizing there are people smarter.’

He was consistently vague about how much of his start-up money he’d gotten from his late father, a real estate mogul type in San Francisco, and how much of it came from those grad school connections. But five years after Wharton – a place he mentioned in just about every interview he gave, almost as some kind of validation, or badge of honor, as if it were far more meaningful to him than having gone to Stanford – he had started his first fund with his Stanford roommate, Christopher Lawton, who’d gone on to get his own MBA at Harvard Business. They were among the whiz boys who had absolutely nailed the financial crisis at the end of George W Bush’s second administration by shorting mortgage securities, a couple ‘Big Short’ players about whom books had been written and movies made. I had watched one of the movies recently, with Christian Bale, not so much for the subject matter, just because I wanted to look at Christian Bale for a couple hours.

A lot of what I read about Drysdale made about as much sense to me as when Spike would begin to rhapsodize about the intricacies of baseball. But I understood the basic premise of Drysdale and Lawton being among those who identified the fact that the housing bubble was about to explode in 2008 like a water balloon dropped out of a window.

And just like that, they were both rich.

To this day, no one was quite sure about what caused their separation, but separate they eventually did. The most Drysdale had ever said about it publicly was that they had different visions of the future. Lawton? He never said anything, because of the nondisclosure agreement he had reportedly signed on his way out the door.

At this point, Alex Drysdale was on his own. And, according to a very long piece about him in The Wall Street Journal, he proceeded to lose everything except his Turnbull & Asser shirts. According to the Journal, he lost and lost big, mostly because of disastrously bad bets on ‘emerging market debt,’ whatever that was.

Drysdale survived, though. ‘Like one of those cockroaches that would survive a nuclear attack,’ one unnamed source said in the Journal. He continued to maintain, up to the present, that his comeback was simply the by-product of ‘good luck and good looks and day-trading.’ He got rich again on tech stocks after Donald Trump was elected. Somehow, even after the virus hit the world like a meteor and after another well-documented slump, Sale Riche flourished while other funds went belly-up.

And even though there were always rumors about sketchy methods and even sketchier investors, he had never been fined by the SEC, had never even been investigated. Another source, in a Crain’s, described Drysdale as the kind of shark who made other sharks swim in the opposite direction, mostly out of respect.

Now he’d eaten Spike’s, whole. It made me wonder how many other businesses, small or large, he might have eaten alive after COVID brought them low.

Before I closed my laptop and headed home to Rosie, I Googled Christopher Lawton and happily discovered he was still in Boston, running a new boutique hotel, The Carmody, that had gone up the year before in Brookline. He was also majority owner in the place.

Tomorrow I’d do things the old-time way and go knock on his door, see if I could get him to fold his NDA with Alex Drysdale into a party hat.

7

I was alone tonight with Rosie, not entirely by choice. I had called Jesse and asked if he wanted to come down for dinner, telling him I was prepared to cook him my specialty.

‘Wasn’t aware you had an official specialty,’ he said.

‘I have many.’

‘And don’t I know it.’

‘And what would you consider my specialties, as I believe we’re clearly no longer talking about food?’

‘Too many to list,’ he said, and then told me he had to take a rain check, he was having dinner with his son, Cole.

‘Do you miss me?’ I said.

‘Intensely.’

‘You’re intense about everything,’ I said.

‘Missing you is my specialty,’ he said.

Dr Silverman had spoken more than once about how I was still my most authentic self when I was alone, whether I was in a relationship or not. There had been other men in my life besides Richie and Jesse. Just not like Richie, and not the way I was with Jesse now, intensely, even with him living in Paradise and me here.

But then came the virus, and I was once again alone more than ever. I managed to continue meeting with clients, thanks to the weird magic of Zoom. I painted more than I had in the past couple years. I was terrified, especially in the early days when testing was still problematic at best, of seeing my parents because of their age. Richie was fiercely vigilant about protecting his son, so I hardly ever saw them. Once Jesse and I had both tested negative, I could at least go up there occasionally, or he would come to Boston, Jesse finally saying, ‘If we die, we die.’ I took long walks with Spike, and occasionally we went on long runs.

I saw Dr Silverman over Zoom and told her, often, that I didn’t feel isolated at a time when others did.

‘You were social distancing before it was a thing,’ she said. ‘But is that a good thing?’ I said.

She had given me her Mona Lisa smile on my laptop screen and said, ‘You tell me.’

‘Here we go,’ I’d said.

Today when I was back at River Street Place I went straight upstairs to my studio and got back to work on one of my favorite pieces in a while, working off a picture of the lighthouse in Paradise. I’d taken the photo on a beach walk one day with Molly Crane, Jesse’s deputy, when we were working a case together.

‘Jesse’s like your lighthouse,’ she said. ‘And you his. You both know you’re there when you need each other.’

‘Just not all the time,’ I said.

‘Oh, God, no,’ she said. ‘What would be the fun in that?’

Then I had taken the picture, with that amazing quality you could get now on your phone, on another one of those days the color of slate when you couldn’t decide where the water ended and the sky began.

I painted until my back started to hurt, the way it did sometimes when I kept leaning over to get closer and closer to my board, as if trying to lose myself in the place and moment I was trying to recapture.

It was a way to turn off my brain and stop thinking about what Alex Drysdale had done to Spike, and getting angry enough to do a lot more than squeeze a nose that really did look as if it had taken years of genetic engineering to produce. Spike was as strong as any man I knew, strong as my father or Jesse or Richie or anybody. And this creep had come along and made him feel weak. And small.

‘Fuck Alex Drysdale,’ I said to Rosie.

She looked up, instantly at high alert, as if what I’d just said sounded exactly like ‘Want a treat?’

I cleaned my brushes, took a shower, got into sweatpants and my It Won’t Always Be Like This T-shirt, and made myself a western omelet, first cooking up tomatoes and red bell peppers and green bell peppers and onions in olive oil. That would show Jesse Stone. No garlic bread on the side. I had made a vow that last year’s jeans were going to fit forever. I cleaned up after myself and went into the living room with the one glass of rosé I was allowing myself these days, at least when it hadn’t been a martini night at Spike’s.

I put on Sonny Rollins’s Saxophone Colossus and sat on the couch with Rosie next to me and read the notes I’d taken as I’d done my research on Alex Drysdale. I had read somewhere that some people in New York wanted to rename the Williamsburg Bridge after Sonny. Maybe it would start a movement. Maybe next we could rename the Tobin Bridge here after Miles.

I finally took Rosie out for her final walk of the night, relied on iron will not to have a Jameson before bed. Tomorrow I would begin to figure out a way to do to Drysdale what he’d just done to Spike. That was the job now. When I needed help on a case, Spike would drop everything. I was now returning the favor. He was the case now.

Until Lee Farrell showed up the next morning to tell me what had happened to his niece.

8

We were at my kitchen table a little after eight. He looked as if he’d been up all night because he had, starting at the Emergency Room at the new medical center at Taft University, west of town, in Walford, a night that really wouldn’t end for him until he drove her back to his new apartment on Summer Street in Fort Point, not far from where Rosie and I used to live.

Emily Barnes, the only child of Lee’s sister, had been walking around the reservoir at Taft late the previous evening, the way a lot of kids did there, when she had been assaulted. I knew the reservoir because Lee and I had walked it with her the previous year, when we’d been her substitutes for Parents Weekend. Her mother, divorced, lived in Hawaii now. Her father, a lawyer, had moved to Los Angeles and generally didn’t give a shit beyond tuition checks. He had also cheated, and copiously, on Emily’s mom, for which the kid had vowed never to forgive him.

‘Not sexually,’ Lee said before I even got the chance to ask.

‘They do a rape kit?’

‘She told them she’d know whether she got raped or not, she didn’t need one,’ he said.

‘They let it be her call?’

‘She said she was leaving if they even tried,’ Lee said. ‘She said she knew how long the process took from one of her friends and she didn’t need one and why bother.’