Payback Read online

  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.”

  THREE

  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.

  FOUR

  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.”

  FIVE

  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.