Payback Read online

  “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.

  SIX

  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.

  SEVEN

  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.

&n
bsp; 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.

  EIGHT

  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.”

  “Did her attacker even try?”

  “Until she started yelling her head off according to Emily,” Lee said. “For some reason he decided to hang around long enough to punch her around instead, the asshole.”

  “She get a look at him?”

  “Says he was wearing the kind of black gaiter we wore during the virus, and a ball cap,” Lee said. “Says all she could see were his eyes.”

  “She try to fight back?”

  “The self-defense course I made her take paid off, until it didn’t,” he said. “He finally ran one way and she ran another, out of the woods and to the walking path. She would have gone straight home except she ran into a friend who insisted she go to the Emergency Room. Em didn’t even want to give them a contact at first, but they insisted, and she finally called me.”

  He rubbed his forehead hard.

  “What the hell?” he said.

  He still looked younger than he actually was, as if he could have been the cool professor at Taft, dressed as if the Brooks Brothers on Newbury had opened early for him, blazer and white shirt with the roll in the collar and silk tie and khakis.

  “She talk to the Walford Police or just the campus police?”

  “She told them at the ER the only cop she was going to talk to was me,” Lee said, “and to stop treating her like some kind of victim.”

  “She is a victim,” I said. “And could have gotten raped.” I drank some coffee. So did he. “Is there any chance this is somebody she knows, and was waiting for her?”

  “She says no,” Lee said.

  “Is it worth talking to her roommate?”

  “Doing the semester abroad thing in Copenhagen,” he said. “Or maybe it’s Stockholm.”

  “How can I help?” I said.

  “Find out who did this to her,” he said. “I just feel as if there’s more here than she’s telling. She might tell a woman more than she’s willing to tell me.”

  “But it sounds as if she just wants it all to go away,” I said.

  “Wishing doesn’t make it so,” he said. “And you have connected to girls in trouble before.”

  I smiled. “Young women.”

  Lee almost managed a smile. “And me the sensitive one,” he said.

  I got up and walked over to the coffeemaker and came back with the pot and topped off our mugs. When I sat back down it occurred to me that there had been times when we’d sat at this same table and Lee had questioned me after a case he was working on and I was working on had intersected. Or collided.

  “The last thing she said before she got into the bed in my guest room was that I just needed to leave this alone,” Lee said.

  “But you don’t leave things alone.”

  “Look who’s talking.”

  “You tell your sister?”

  “Em made me promise not to.”

  We sat there in silence. I asked again if he wanted something to eat. Usually when I felt maternal instincts coming on, I found a place to lie down until they passed.

  “I’ll be happy to talk to her,” I said.

  “I want to hire you,” he said.

  “Friends don’t hire friends,” I said.

  “I’m asking you, as a friend, Sunny, to let me hire you.”

  “Okay.”

  “I would find out who did this to her myself,” he said, “but I am up to my ass in alligators with this Carly Meme shit.”

  I told him he didn’t have to say anything more, and put my hand across the table for him to shake.

  “I didn’t even ask if you have anything going yourself,” he said.

  I told him about Spike then.

  �
��But as you know, I can multitask with the best of them,” I said.

  He smiled again. “Look at how well you’re doing with Jesse and Richie.”

  “Don’t take this the wrong way, but I’m currently only tasking Jesse.”

  Lee said, “Not sure I’ve heard that word used quite that way.”

  “Dirty mind,” I said.

  “Why we get along,” he said. “I can afford this, Sunny. My father left me more money than you think. It was guilt, mostly, once he finally decided that me being gay didn’t make me the devil’s spawn.”

  “Better late than never.”

  I walked him out to his car. He said he’d call Emily when she was awake and tell her I was going to stop by. For now, he said, he was off to fight crime. I told him I felt as if I were doing the same with Alex Drysdale.

  “Same church,” Lee said. “Different pew.”

  Then I watched him get into his car and head up River Street Place toward Charles, not able to help myself from thinking that this showed all signs of being a particularly shitty week.

  NINE

  Christopher Lawton, who’d had a Massachusetts Lodging Association meeting a couple blocks away, sat next to me on a bench behind the Marriott Long Wharf, each of us holding coffee we’d bought at the Starbucks inside the hotel. We stared out at the water on one of those perfect days that made you remember what it was like when you actually felt like the world was on the right course, and not headed straight for the iceberg.

  Even though he and Drysdale had to be the same age, Lawton looked older. He was trim, not much taller than me, his hair a salt-and-pepper color that I described as George Clooney.

  “I couldn’t resist seeing you,” he said, “after what you told me on the phone.”

  “That I wanted to string Alex Drysdale up by his balls and hang him over a railing on Old Ironsides?” I said.

  “Very powerful imagery,” he said. “It was like having me at hello.”

  “I was a fine arts major,” I said.