Payback Read online

  “I’m not saying Spike’s is small-time,” I said, “but why would somebody like Alex Drysdale punch down like that?”

  He smiled now, fully.

  “I’m sure you’ll find out whatever needs finding out,” he said.

  We stared over to the ornate old bridge over the Swan Boat lagoon. Silence had never seemed awkward for us in the past, but had grown increasingly so.

  “How’s Spike doing with all this?” Richie said finally.

  “Badly,” I said. “He seems broken.”

  “But you’re going to make him whole.”

  “Or die trying,” I said.

  “Hoping that’s a figure of speech.”

  Now I smiled.

  “I don’t like people threatening you,” he said. “Never have, never will.”

  “I didn’t imagine you would.”

  “Desmond would have you watched if I asked,” he said.

  “I know he would,” I said. “For now, just ask him if there might be some new kids on the block.”

  “I’ve got regulars at the bar who are hedge-funders who aren’t total dirtbags,” Richie said.

  “Drysdale is.”

  “And you’re going to take him down a peg or two.”

  “Or just take him down, period.”

  “That’s my girl,” he said.

  “That’s what my father always says.”

  He sighed. “I never did like playing that game,” he said. “Haven’t you and your therapist sorted that out yet?”

  We both stood and hugged again. When he pulled back he said, “How’s Jesse?”

  “You don’t care,” I said.

  “You’re right,” he said. “I don’t.”

  He said he’d call later after seeing Desmond; right now he had to go pick up Richard at The Advent School, a few blocks over from the park on Brimmer. We didn’t kiss each other goodbye. I watched him until he crossed Beacon and then disappeared down Charles, then I turned and headed in the other direction.

  I didn’t need a therapist to tell me that duality could be a bitch sometimes.

  Lee Farrell called a few minutes after I was back in my office. I asked if he’d been in contact with Emily and he said not in the way I might think.

  “I just got a call from my sister,” he said. “Emily is on her debit card, and forged her signature and took a ten thousand cash advance off her account.”

  “As in dollars,” I said.

  “As in.”

  “It’s a lot of money for a college kid, Lee,” I said. “Is she into drugs?”

  “There has never been any indication,” he said. “She’s been at Taft three years and there wasn’t a whiff of trouble until the other night.”

  I thought of what my father had said at lunch the day before.

  “Everybody’s got secrets,” I said. “And she won’t return your calls or texts, I gather?”

  “Nope,” he said. “Her mother has tried, too.”

  “She never asked you for money?”

  “Never,” he said.

  “So she has ten grand in her pocket and she’s out there somewhere,” I said.

  “I got a friend in the department to ping her phone,” he said. “The last place she used it was at my place, before she took off with her boyfriend.”

  “If he even is her boyfriend,” I said.

  “Your guess is as good as mine,” he said. “Prying information out of her about her romantic life practically requires the Jaws of Life.”

  I told him I’d been the same way when I was in college, for what that was worth. I used to tell my parents that I didn’t talk about my love life, or what passed for a love life in those days, if caught behind enemy lines.

  “I’ve got a bad feeling about this,” he said. “What happened the other night has to have something to do with her needing money. Nothing else makes sense.”

  “Are you saying that as an uncle, or cop?”

  “You know the answer to that,” Lee Farrell said. “And does it even matter?”

  “In the great grand scheme of things, no,” I said.

  “I’m asking you as her uncle,” he said. “But the cop in me tells me something’s wrong here.”

  There was a pause.

  “You have to find her,” he said.

  Then: “Please.”

  “I will,” I said, hoping I sounded more confident about that than I felt, and then told him I was on my way back to college.

  This continued to show all signs of being a spectacularly shitty week.

  FIFTEEN

  Over time Taft University had grown from red bricks and ivy on what looked like the planet preppie into a futuristic McMansion of a school.

  A couple decades earlier, the fourth-richest man in America—or maybe it was the fifth, I didn’t actually check the rankings—had poured enough money into the school after his daughter had gone there to buy Vermont. I was aware, or as aware as I could be about sports, that they’d always had a pretty fancy basketball program, one good enough to occasionally make the front page of the Globe. Spike had recently told me that they’d also started playing big-time college football. I told him if he was happy about that then so was I.

  Part of the Taft-improvement program was that senior men and women got to live in modern frame houses that had been built on the campus at the same they’d built the new football stadium. Emily lived in one of them, 323 College Road, across the street from the ancient stone library that looked older than the earth. By the time I’d parked in one of the public lots near the stadium and walked across the quadrangle, having passed kids who’d just finished their last class of the day or were on their way to one, it was four o’clock.

  Emily’s row house, white with green shutters, green being one of the Taft colors, looked exactly like the ones on either side of it. But they all still looked quite new, including picket fences in front that looked freshly painted. It was, all things considered, a long way from Myles Standish Hall at Boston University.

  I rang the doorbell and got no answer, not having expected one. Then I knocked on the door, hard. Nothing.

  “Ma’am?” I heard from behind me.

  Ma’am. It was starting to happen less infrequently. To me it always sounded like “Grandma?”

  I turned around. She wore a green Taft cap, jeans so tight I imagined her having to put them on in tiny increments, like it was part of a bar method stretch, old-school Converse sneakers, and a backpack.

  “You looking for Em?” she said.

  “I am,” I said. “You live on the block?”

  “Two doors down.”

  “You haven’t by any chance run into her today?”

  “Not for a couple, actually,” she said. “You’re not her mom, are you? The one from Hawaii?”

  Ma’am-ed and mom-ed. I resisted a sudden urge to tell her that it was a pity she obviously hadn’t had the grades to get into Harvard.

  “More like an unofficial aunt,” I said. “I was in the area and thought I might take her out for an early dinner.”

  “Sorry you wasted the trip,” she said, and gave me a wave and walked across the street in the general direction of the library. Emily’s side of College Road was empty for the time being. I sat on the front stoop and waited to see how long it would remain that way. My lock-picking set was in the cool new Isabel Marant shoulder bag I’d gotten on sale when Jesse and I had made a weekend trip to New York City. I imagined it was the first time a Marant bag had contained a hook, tension wrench, twist-free wrench, offset pick, half-diamond, short and medium hooks, and a Bogata rake.

  If you were fast, and I was very fast when it came to the type of deadbolt lock on Emily’s door, a passerby would think you were just using a key, even though I needed both hands to do the job right.

  I had learned how
to pick locks, and disarm alarms when necessary, from my friend Ghost Garrity. Another fine art not taught at BU.

  The sidewalk in front of the house remained empty. I went back to the door and took out the small tension wrench and pick. Looked up and down the street again. Still no hard-bodied products of higher education. Turned and worked the pin along the shearline, felt the cylinder turn almost immediately.

  And I was in.

  The house was somehow smaller on the inside than it looked from the outside: living room to your left as you came through the door, tiny kitchen behind it. Both bedrooms were upstairs, connected by a shared bathroom. I remembered Lee telling me that her roommate was abroad. The roommate’s bedroom was to the right, so clean and organized it looked as if she hadn’t moved in yet. The one with the huge brass E on the outside of the door was Emily’s.

  I had locked the front door behind me, as to give myself some time if Emily suddenly showed up.

  I checked the bathroom first. Her makeup stuff was lined up haphazardly on the counter. If she had taken some of it with her on a short road trip, or on the run, she had left a lot of hair and face product behind. There were still gel creams and face cleansers and face polishes here. Brushes in a Taft coffee cup. Blush. Foundation. The essentials. Mostly name brands. Some better than mine, damn her.

  What was I looking for? The answer was simple enough: something. Or anything that might tell me if she’d left for a couple days, or longer. Or even for good. Maybe the beating hadn’t been an attempted rape at all, maybe just a warning. But a warning about what? All I knew was that she had needed to put her hands on ten thousand dollars, and fast, and had been afraid to ask her mother for it, or her uncle. Her uncle the cop. Ten thousand was a lot. I knew it was for me, and for a homicide cop like Lee Farrell, no matter how much money he’d recently inherited.

  I went into the bedroom, saw clothes on the floor and on the bed and on the chair facing her desk. At least, I thought, I wouldn’t have to worry about her thinking the place had been tossed when she did come home. No laptop on the desk. A corkboard hanging on one wall. A ticket stub for a Maroon 5 concert at the Garden tacked to it. A picture of her and Lee at a Patriots game, Lee wearing his Brady jersey, one I knew he wore even when watching the games at home on television.

  I’d asked him once why grown men did dress-up things like that.

  “This jersey won us our last two Super Bowls,” he explained, as if that should have been the most obvious thing in the world.

  I went through the desk. I went through the drawers of her antique dresser. Underwear in the top two drawers. A couple bad-girl black things in the middle of the pile. Weed and rolling paper in a plastic Baggie underneath the underwear. I frankly wasn’t even sure why you’d hide it any longer, kids were more likely to have marijuana on them than Tic Tacs.

  I went into the closet then. A couple nice outfits, but mostly jeans, shirts, boots, and sneakers on the floor. A pair of Crocs, now that they’d caught the fashion wave again. The basics. A wire hamper for dirty clothes, overflowing. One long shelf over the bar from which the clothes were hanging, some caps to one side, sweaters stacked neatly next to them.

  I reached up there, feeling around underneath the sweaters, and touched a small metal box, about the size of a shoebox. Brought it down, saw that it actually had a small lock on it. No challenge for Sunny Randall, master lock-picker. I brought the box over to the bed and used the pick I’d used downstairs for about five seconds, and opened it.

  And whistled.

  There were three sets of playing cards inside the box, the seal broken on each one of them. A folded pair of glasses.

  And a plastic pint bottle of invisible ink.

  “Better to mark the cards with, my dear,” I said.

  I put on the glasses, took a card out of one of the boxes. Ace of diamonds. Looked at both sides of it through the glasses.

  I didn’t see it right away, but the marking on the outside was clearly visible, dark blue against the red.

  “You have got to be shitting me,” I said.

  I put everything back inside, placed the box back on the shelf where I’d found it, walked downstairs and out the door. There were a couple girls about fifty yards away, walking toward me. I quickly used the pick to set the deadbolt, went across College Road and the quadrangle and past the stadium to where I’d parked my car.

  I wasn’t any closer to knowing where Lee’s darling niece was. But I knew what she was.

  A card cheat.

  SIXTEEN

  I met Spike at Spike’s. He was still going there at night. He said it was like the old Robert Frost line. “Home is the place where, when you go there, they don’t tell you to get the fuck out,” he said.

  I told him that was my general sense of things, yes. Then I asked him about what I’d found in Emily’s room, knowing he was a serious poker player. But also knowing that in the games he played, the most he had ever lost or won in a night was five hundred dollars.

  “People actually wear those glasses to cheat?” I said.

  “Rarely,” Spike said, “and usually only with suckers.” He grinned. “Put it this way. If you show up one night to play with pros and have started to wear glasses between one game and the next, you better have a note from your eye doctor.”

  “But you can cheat and get away with it?” I said.

  “Sure,” Spike said. “A marked deck is like having a GPS in your car. You can’t get lost.”

  “Explain.”

  “Having a deck like that doesn’t mean you win every hand,” he said. “You still have to have the cards. But when you do have the cards, you know you can bet them. Say you’re playing a game like Hold ’Em and you have a low straight. You know what that is, right?”

  “I have a general sense.”

  “Now, it might not be a great hand,” Spike said. “But if you know the guy raising has three of a kind, you can take him to the cleaners. If you’re playing a pot limit, it only has to happen three hands a night. It just lets you know you’re on the right road and you don’t make a wrong turn.”

  He had been at the end of the bar nursing a beer when I got there, staring into the back room as if worried a fire was about to break out. Then I saw it was Alex Drysdale he was looking at, Drysdale somehow acting as if he were seated at the head of the table though it was round, surrounded by young guys who looked as if they might have grown up with his poster on their bedroom wall.

  As I sat down next to Spike there was a burst of laughter from them. From experience, I knew Drysdale wasn’t that funny. Maybe the boys were afraid not to laugh, for fear of being banished into the night.

  Spike turned away and looked at me, and my outfit.

  “I forget,” he said, “are you a Shark or a Jet?”

  He had me there. I was wearing badass clothes: black leather AllSaints biker jacket, black jeans, tee, boots. I thought I looked pretty damn good for someone who’d been ma’am-ed and mom-ed in the same day.

  “He likes this,” Spike said, nodding at Drysdale. “I swear, he likes being here even more when I’m here. Like he’s rubbing my face in it.”

  “Down, boy,” I said.

  Beer was a good sign. Spike could drink beer from here to Samuel Adams’s birthplace on Purchase Street and back and never show any signs of being overserved.

  “Does he make you pay?” I said.

  “No,” Spike said. “All part of big-timing me. When he saw me sitting here he slapped me on the back and pointed to my glass and said, ‘On me.’”

  “Isn’t it rich,” I said.

  It got a smile out of him.

  “Are we a pair,” he said.

  Another burst of laughter.

  “Send in the clowns,” I said.

  Jack, his favorite bartender, brought me a glass of my favorite pinot grigio without being asked. I drank some. Spik
e asked if I was making any progress looking into Drysdale’s background. I told him about my meeting with Rita, and her having sent me a list of other people in town to whom Drysdale had loaned money before relieving them of their businesses. And then strong-arming them into keeping their mouths shut.

  “Technically you were the one who got threatened,” Spike said.

  “Happens to one of us, happens to both of us,” I said.

  “But we’re not the only ones.”

  “No, sir,” I said.

  “You going to talk to some of the others?” Spike said.

  “If they’re not afraid to talk to me,” I said, “I’d at least like to talk to one.”

  “If you start tomorrow,” Spike said, “I could go with you.”

  I told him I would bring him with me when the time came, but had another plan for tomorrow. When I told him what it was, it got another smile out of him.

  “When all else fails, annoy somebody,” he said.

  “Words to live by.”

  “Even when they don’t know they’re being annoyed.”

  “Boots on the ground beats a search engine any day,” I said.

  I sipped some wine.

  There was now a burst of sudden applause from Drysdale’s table.

  “Maybe,” I said to Spike, “there’s some kind of escort service for ass-kissers.”

  “Unless they just come by it naturally,” Spike said.

  He waved at Jack for another beer.

  “I’m glad you’re here,” Spike said, and we clinked glasses.

  “I needed to talk to somebody who knows even more about poker than you do,” I said.

  “Want to learn about flops and turns and rivers?” he said.

  “Please, no,” I said. “I just want to know if a college kid could get in deep enough to steal money from her mother.”

  “Maybe she just thought of it as a temporary loan,” Spike said. “But to your point, it could happen to anybody, especially if they fancy themselves players. Poker has gotten huge over the last ten years, especially since they started putting it on ESPN. One of the guys I used to play with, before he went looking for bigger games, called me up about six months ago and asked if I was ready to run with the big dogs. I asked how big the pots could get. He said half a million. I said I was going back to bingo.”