Sudden Mischief Part 25

"You can't press it," I said. "I have your letters and your pictures. You take it to court and you'll lose, quite publicly."

"But I can't tell my husband," she said in a tone that suggested that I was an idiot for suggesting otherwise.

"Well, you don't have to right now. Until we find Brad, you can probably sit tight and keep your mouth shut."

"But what if you find him?"

"Well, maybe he won't come back," she said hopefully.

"Then the lawsuit becomes moot, doesn't it," I said.

She nodded slowly. "Yes. I... guess... so."

"But take a worst-case scenario, maybe I'll find him."

She shook her head and looked at the tabletop and didn't speak.

"If," I said, "anything happens that prevents him from coming back. And if you had anything to do with it, I will tell everyone everything I know," I said.

"You don't think I... My G.o.d, you must think I'm simply awful."

"Yeah," I said. "I guess I do."

chapter thirty-two.

HAWK HAD BEEN bored outside of Civil Streets for nearly a week. No one had showed up there. Quirk had the accountants poking into the books, but they were having difficulty, mostly because there wasn't much in the way of books to poke into. The corporation appeared to consist entirely of some stationery and the empty store front in Stoneham Square. I wanted to know the connection between Gavin and Carla, which logically, would help explain the connection between Gavin and Sterling. Logic was less common and considerably less useful than it was cracked up to be. But it was a place to start. I could hang around Carla, and if Gavin spotted me he'd come by and terrify me again, and maybe feel, this time, he had to back it up, which wouldn't get me what I was after. It would be hard to stake Carla out covertly where she lived on the Somerville waterfront. And she showed no pressing need to drop in on Civil Streets and flaunt her presidency. The better bet was probably to follow him around, and maybe he and Carla would cross paths. If Gavin was a mob guy, he might take a little more tailing than if he was an account manager at Smith Barney. So I rescued Hawk from Stoneham Square.

We picked Gavin up on a rainy morning in Winthrop Square where Gavin and Warren had offices. We tracked him unseen and relentless to Starbuck's, where he had a coffee and a big bun. Then we tracked him back to Winthrop Square and stood in doorways alert for every development until about 6:45 that night when he came out and walked over to the Waterfront and went into his condo on Lewis Wharf. Hawk and I stood around for maybe half an hour more, to be sure the rain had soaked through evenly, and then we went over to the bar in the Marriott.

"Feel like a f.u.c.king haddock," Hawk said.

He ordered a Glennfidich on the rocks. I had a tall Courvoisier and soda.

"You see any clues?" I said.

Hawk looked at me without speaking. The rain had beaded brilliantly on his smooth head.

"No, me either," I said.

The bar was full of dark suits and white s.h.i.+rts and colorful suspenders and ripe cigars. There were a few women there, mostly in red dresses. Several were smoking cigars.

"This the best idea you got?" Hawk said.

I knew that being uncomfortable always made him peevish.

"When in doubt, follow someone around," I said.

"How come when you in doubt," Hawk said, "I get to do half the following?"

"Because you are my friend," I said.

"Oh," Hawk said. "That's good. I was thinking it was because I was an a.s.shole."

"That too," I said.

The next morning it was still rainy, but I was better dressed for it in a brown leather trenchcoat and a Harris tweed scally cap. Hawk wore a black leather poncho and a big cowboy hat with silver conchos on the headband.

"First rule of good tracking," I said. "Remain inconspicuous."

"Exactly," Hawk said.

We stood as best we could out of the weather, drinking coffee and discussing some of our most interesting romantic encounters. Hawk's were more exotic and of a grander scale. So he got to talk more than I did. Gavin came out and walked over to Starbuck's and had coffee and a bun and walked back to his office. Hawk and I dogged his every footstep. That is, both of us dogged him on the way to. I dogged him alone on the way back, while Hawk bought us two large Guatemalan coffees and two lemon scones and caught up with me back in the doorway.

"Spot anything?" Hawk said.

"Shut up," I said.

"Shame they don't sell donuts," Hawk said.

"Pretty soon, I figure, Dunkin' will be selling scones."

"Don't it always seem to go," Hawk said.

We moved on from romantic interludes to Junior Griffey and Michael Jordan and Evander Holyfield, which turned us inevitably to Willie Mays and Oscar Robertson and Muhammad Ali, which segued into Ben Webster and June Christie, which then moved a.s.sociatively to Gayle Sayers and Jim Brown, which led on to David McCullough's biography of Truman and an old Burt Lancaster western called Ulzana's Raid. We had started on naming our all-time all-white basketball team, which Hawk contended was an oxymoron, and had gotten as far as Jerry West and John Havlicek when Gavin came out of his office building with his collar up and got into a black Chrysler Town Car parked in front of the building with its motor running.

"Oh boy," Hawk said.

Hawk had parked on a hydrant at the right spot so that we could go whichever way Gavin could take in the one-way warren of downtown. It had denied us the comfort of a warm dry car, but we would have been warm, dry, and lonely had we done it another way.

We followed the Town Car through the maze of center city digging. Then we were on the Southeast Expressway and in time we were onto Route 3.

"This is the most excitement I had since that lemon scone," Hawk said.

The Town Car cruised at the speed limit. We lay pretty well back off of Gavin; there wasn't much traffic and the exits gave you ample warning. We were in no danger of losing him. In Hanover, they turned off and we drifted off after them and went west a few hundred suburban yards and pulled into the parking lot of an Italian restaurant named Elsie's. Gavin's driver pulled around behind the restaurant and parked. Hawk parked on the other side.

"He knows me," I said.

"I'll go in," Hawk said.

He took off the cowboy hat and the leather poncho and stepped out of the car. In two steps he was into the entryway, with barely a rain drop on his cashmere blazer. I slipped into the driver's seat in case we needed to be quick and tried to find jazz on the radio and failed. Besides all the current music, there was cla.s.sical and there was a couple of music-of-your-life stations. I had long ago decided that Gogi Grant singing "The Wayward Wind" was not the music of my life, and I settled for a cla.s.sical station.

In maybe two minutes Hawk came out and got in the pa.s.senger side. He was smiling.

"Richard having lunch," Hawk said.

"And you know with who," I said.

"Uh huh."

"And you are going to tell me as soon as you get through grinning like a G.o.dd.a.m.ned ape," I said.

"That a racial slur?" Hawk said.

"Yes," I said.

Hawk grinned some more. "Haskell Wechsler."

I leaned back a little in the driver's seat.

"The worst man alive," I said.

"'That's Haskell," Hawk said. "Bet Gavin buys the lunch."

"Haskell know you?" I said.

"Of course."

"He spot you?"

"Of course not. Haskell don't notice nothing when he's eating."

"Let's join them," I said. "See what the specials are."

chapter thirty-three.

HASKELL WECHSLER WAS a fat guy with very little hair. What there was, he had dyed black and combed up over his baldness and plastered tight against his scalp. He had pale skin and thick lips. He wore thick gla.s.ses, a huge diamond ring on his little finger, and an a.s.sertively expensive Rolex watch on his left wrist. The collar of his white dress s.h.i.+rt was folded out over the lapels of his gray sharkskin suit. The top several b.u.t.tons of the s.h.i.+rt were undone over a humongous gold chain. He had tucked his napkin into the V of the open collar. He was a niche specialist, a loan shark who belonged to no mob but found s.p.a.ce to operate just outside the not-quite intersecting fringes of other men's power. He lent money at ten percent a week to people who couldn't possibly pay it back and squeezed them ferociously for the interest. Even when they could make the weekly vig, they never paid off the princ.i.p.al and remained in permanent and perilous debt to Haskell.

"Couple of bruisers at the table to the right," Hawk said as we walked in.

"If they try to shoot me," I said, "prevent them."

Hawk nodded. "I think I understand," he said and walked over and stood behind the table where the bruisers were carbo loading on linguine with clams. Gavin and Wechsler were sitting alone next to them at a table for four. I pulled out one of the empty chairs and sat down with them.

"Boy," I said, "good to see a familiar face, isn't it?"

Haskell had a mouthful of lasagna. He chewed it and swallowed and said to Gavin, "You know this guy?"

Gavin nodded. "And I don't like him," he said.

Haskell had a sloppy drink of red wine and put the gla.s.s back down and wiped his mouth on his napkin without untucking it.

"So," he said and looked straight at me, "you heard him. We don't like you. Take a f.u.c.king walk."

"I'm sure, Richie, you just give me half a chance, we could be pals again."

Without looking back, Haskell spoke to one of his bodyguards.

"Buster," he said, "move this douche bag away from my table."

Buster looked like the man for the job okay, but he was in a stare-down with Hawk.

"Got another guy here, Mr. Wechsler," Buster said.

"The n.i.g.g.e.r? So move him too."

"I know the n.i.g.g.e.r," Buster said.

Something in Buster's voice got Wechsler's attention. He half turned, his fat face made fatter by the huge mouthful of lasagna he was working on. He looked at Hawk and then turned back and looked at me, then he swallowed his lasagna and wiped his mouth again with his napkin.

"Hawk," he said, mostly to himself.

"You missed a spot," I said, "over there on the right. Where the smile lines would be in a human being."

"So whaddya want?" Haskell said.

His voice had a hoa.r.s.e quality as if he needed to clear his throat. And he had some kind of speech impediment, not quite a lisp, that made his s's slushy.

"I want to know about Richie and you," I said, "and Carla Quagliozzi and Brad Sterling and Civil Streets, and Galapalooza and Francis Ronan and his lovely wife Jeanette, and a shooter named Cony Brown and how all of that is connected, or if it isn't, where the connections are and where they aren't."

Wechsler continued to eat as I talked. There was sauce on his s.h.i.+rt front and some on one sleeve of his suit jacket. His sallow face had gotten red from the energy he put into the eating. He looked at Gavin, still chewing, and said around his mouthful of food, "Who the f.u.c.k is this guy?"

"Private cop," Gavin said, "working for a loser named Brad Sterling."

"Who the f.u.c.k is Brad Sterling?"

"n.o.body you know, Haskell."

"See. I don't know nothing," Wechsler said, "so take a f.u.c.king hike for yourself. Save yourself a lot of trouble, you do."

"Trouble is my middle name," I said.

"I never knew your middle name," Hawk said.

"So now you do."

"You have no obligation to converse with these men in any way," Gavin said to Wechsler. "My advice is to say nothing further to him."