Mortal Bonds (16 page)

“He was nice.”

“Can I be an asshole and ask you something I have no right asking? Did you love Willie?”

She sighed and rolled her eyes. “Oh, god, now you sound just like my therapist. She’s always asking me that. I don’t know! Let me ask. Do you love your son?”

“Absolutely. Without any shadow of a doubt.”

“Well, see! That’s great. You know that. You’re lucky. I’ve never known anything that definite in my life. Certainly not when I was little. I think maybe my aunt loved me like that. She was nice to me. Willie could be nice like that. I miss him all the time. But when I heard he was dead I didn’t fall apart and cry all night or want to die myself. I cleaned the litter box and vacuumed. I didn’t watch a movie that night. Does that mean I didn’t love him or that I did?”

I didn’t know the answer to that.

T
he Kid and I were sitting with Roger in a booth in the back of Hanrahan’s. The Kid was taking occasional bites from his grilled cheese while keeping up his end of the conversation with Roger. His line of five Matchbox cars was in perfect order down the center of the table.

“But why?”

“I already told ya, Kid. I got no idear.” Roger shuffled a well-used deck of cards.

“But why?” The Kid adjusted the blue Citroën a tenth of a millimeter. I couldn’t have said why it made a difference, but I felt better.

“Yeah, well, I can see your point, but that’s just how the game is played, sport. Aces can be ones or elevens. Them’s the rules.” He stopped shuffling and gave the boy a hard stare. “And don’t ask me why.”

Hard stares had no effect on my son, but his normal attention span is far too short to maintain an argument. He picked up his sandwich and began flying it around his plate.

Roger dealt two cards. “So, what’ve ya got there? Jack of clubs and nine of diamonds. What’ve ya got?”

The half-eaten airplane continued to circle the ketchup-covered landing zone, now with an audio track, supplied by my son, of vaguely piglike noises.

“Why are you trying to teach my son blackjack?”

“Because I don’t know how to play bridge. Come on, young fella. A jack and a nine. What’ve ya got.”

“Leave him alone. Children don’t add double-digit numbers until second grade. You’ll stress him out.”

The Kid gave a quick glance at the cards. “Fifteen!” He took a bite of airplane. He may have been wrong, but he was not stressed.

“Well, he’s no Rain Man,” Roger said.

While I was pleased to see that the Kid was communicating with someone, there was an annoying voice in my head demanding to know why it wasn’t me. “That whole Rain Man story was fiction, you know.” I was mildly surprised at how angry I sounded. “My son is even more special. For one thing, he’s real.”

“Sorry. I tried a joke without figuring in what kind of audience I was working. Won’t happen again.” He turned back to the Kid. “Try again, midget. You got it right yesterday. Nine and what? What’s a jack?”

The Kid dropped the remains of the sandwich on his plate and stared at the cards. Then he cooed, “The man with the feather.”

“Jacks are tens, aren’t they?” Roger continued. “So ya got a ten and a nine. You can do this.”

“Tell Roger to leave you in peace,” I said.

The Kid ignored me—as he had all week.

“Jason Stafford?”

I looked up. A big, slightly unkempt man in a gray suit was blocking the end of the booth. He looked like nine out of ten of the government bureaucrats I had ever dealt with.

“Father or son?” I said. Then I recognized him. “Where’s the hat?”

He didn’t smile. He nodded as though he recognized humor as a common human failing.

“Charles Gibbons.” He flipped a leather ID holder. “SEC.”

“Nice to meet you, Mr. Gibbons. Talk to my lawyer.” I was clean. Legit. A model citizen ever since my release from federal prison. And what wasn’t quite squeaky clean was untraceable. “Why were you following me?”

“I wasn’t following you.” He looked away. He was a terrible liar.

“Yes, you were. I saw you. Two days ago, just down the block.”

He ignored me. I wanted to ignore him back.

“I have some questions about the people you have been associating with,” he said. “A quick chat with me might clear up some misconceptions. The kind of misconceptions that could get you sent back upstate.”

I had been aces with my parole officer ever since I had helped the FBI catch a killer eight months ago. But I had more than two years to go keeping him happy, and an unkind word from another law enforcement agency could easily end our honeymoon.

“Listen, I’m serious. I don’t discuss the weather with you guys without a lawyer being present. Nothing personal. Leave me your card and I’ll have him call you and set something up. Deal?”

“Nineteen!” the Kid suddenly cried out, bouncing the jack off Roger’s nose.

“Very good, Kid,” I said without thinking. Then it struck me. Where was I when he learned his teens? A few months back, he refused to acknowledge eleven, and here he was doing second-grade math. “Really, that was great. You are a math monster!” I held my hand up for a high five.

He ignored me.

Roger was rubbing his nose where he’d been hit. “I been assaulted,” he said. He turned to the Fed. “You’re not going to protect me?”

Mr. Gibbons ignored him. “I’m looking for some specific information and I think you can help me find it. Give me five minutes, that’s all.”

I liked the guy better when he was begging—but not enough to deliberately hang myself. “I think you’re wrong. I can’t imagine what we might have to talk about. For five minutes or five seconds. Please, let me enjoy this quality time of being ignored by my son.” I gave him my most ingratiating smile, the one I used on Skeli when it was my turn to do the dishes.

“I could come back with a warrant,” he said. The smile hadn’t worked. It never worked with Skeli either. “On Friday afternoon, so we’d have to keep you all weekend until your hotshot lawyer gets back from his beach house on Monday morning. But don’t worry about your son. We’ll park him with Child Services. He’ll sleep on a cot in the office and eat Happy Meals. He’ll love it.”

Or be watched over by Angie. A situation guaranteed to terrorize them both. Either way, his routine would be shot. The Kid needed his routine. Depended on it. Without it, he would begin to regress again. Months of hard-won adjustments to life in the alien world he inhabited would be lost. I was straddling a line between exploding in anger and total capitulation.

Roger intervened.

“You know somethin’, Cholly? There’s another way to play this. If I wanted something from somebody and I saw him in a bar, first thing, I’d offer to buy a round. Maybe it softens ’em up. It shows some respect. You see what I’m saying?”

Charles Gibbons thought it over. He wasn’t stupid, just very deliberate. He weighed his options and moved only when he’d thought it all through. “What’ll it be?”

“Rémy,” Roger said. Then, quickly seizing the opportunity, “Double.”

“Bud Light,” I said. “And a water for my son.”

He gave a quick nod and turned for the bar. I heard him ask for a Maker’s Mark on the rocks for himself—he wasn’t on a government expense allowance.

“I’ll take the Kid home,” Roger said quietly.

“No, stay,” I said. “I might like a witness. This is the guy with the hat I told you about. Across from Fischer Brothers.”

Roger nodded, then pointed with his chin. Gibbons was back.

The Fed set the drinks down. “Maybe you and I could have our talk over there,” he said, gesturing toward an empty booth. “We wouldn’t have to bother your friend.”

Roger slid over, making room for him. “Don’t mind me and the Kid. He’s just been showing off his math skills.” He took a sip of cognac and began to shuffle the deck again.

We all sat and drank for a minute. The Kid belched—loud enough to turn heads at the bar. I ignored him. I had learned to pick my spots, and a loud belch in a noisy bar was not important. Holding hands while crossing Broadway was important. Not biting his teacher was important. Not screaming “stupid cunt” at the driver on the M104 when the bus lurched before we were sitting down was very important.

“Four minutes left,” I finally said.

He sat down.

“You’re in trouble,” he said. “If you are not now, you soon will be.”

“I’m listening.”

The Kid made bubble sounds in the bottom of his glass with the straw.

“Me, too,” Roger said.

Gibbons was not reassured by this.

“You are talking to the wrong people.”

“A lot of people have been telling me this. Who are the right people?”

“I mean that these people could be trouble for you.”

“You are here out of concern for my welfare? Why am I not feeling all warm and cuddly?”

“You are out of your depth. Tell me whatever you’ve come up with. I will share it with the authorities. Take your son and go home and whenever any of these people call, tell them you found nothing and want nothing more to do with this.”

“You’re trying to scare me.” I looked at the Kid, who was again lining up his cars on the table in front of him—dinnertime. “It’s not working.”

Gibbons looked over at the Kid and back to me. “Murder means nothing to them. You. Or your family.”

“I think we’re done talking, Mr. Gibbons. Talk to my lawyer. Now, beat it.”

He surprised me. He stood up.

Roger smiled up at him and toasted with his glass. “I’ll get ya next time.”

Gibbons ignored him.

“Ask Virgil about the lawyer.”

“What lawyer?”

“Ask Virgil.”

“Give me a hint, big guy.”

“In Switzerland.”

“Biondi? Virgil knows about him?” That might be worth exploring.

“You know? And you’re still playing with these people? You’re an idiot.”

That made it unanimous.

I laughed. “Well, thanks, Mr. Gibbons. That’s pretty straightforward.”

Gibbons tossed back the rest of his twelve dollars’ worth of bourbon and stomped out.

“That guy’s not right,” I said.

“Howzat?” Roger said.

“No Fed ever bought me a drink before.”

•   •   •

DESPITE MY SCHOOLYARD BRAVADO,
I was beginning to get spooked. Both Brady and Gibbons had given me straight-up warnings, and Douglas Randolph’s freak-out was beginning to feel like part of a pattern, rather than a one-off bit of hysteria. I seemed to have set something in motion—I just didn’t know what. I reminded myself that a million dollars a year for life was a goal that could support some temporary discomfort. I waited until Angie and her family came to pick up the Kid, and then I began retracing some of my steps.

The first stop was back where I had started. An old friend. But Paddy Gallagher hadn’t been into Joe Allen’s in a week, the bartender informed me. She wasn’t exactly worried about him, but she did admit that it was unusual.

“His voice mail box is full,” I said.

She gave a double-shoulder shrug—which caused some eye-catching undulation in the deep vee of her blouse. “Can’t help you. If you leave your name, I’ll tell him you were by.” She leaned forward and hunched her shoulders just enough to test my resolve. “And your number.”

I failed the test—I looked. She smiled. We are all who we were in high school—I was forty-five, a father, an ex-husband, and an ex-convict, but I still became tongue-tied when a woman vamped me.

“I’ll be back,” I said, retreating.

“Do that,” she called as I headed for the door. “I work days on the weekends and Monday and Tuesday nights.”

Paddy kept a cubbyhole office in the Palace Theatre building over on Broadway, so I walked in that direction while I made another call on my cell. I knew someone who might know where to find Paddy.

“Mouse. It’s Jason Stafford.”

“Oh, yeah. I hear you’re a dangerous man to talk to these days.”

“Me? Not a chance. What do you hear?”

“What do you got?”

“An SEC bean counter named Gibbons—who tells me that I’m in danger—and Doug Randolph, who says I threatened his wife.”

“Yeah, that’s what I hear. Randolph, I mean. I don’t know this other guy.”

“I’m sorry for his troubles, but I didn’t send anyone there.”

“I believe it, but it’s got some of your other old friends spooked.”

“Paddy.”

“In one. Randolph talked to him and the old guy took the next flight to London. He said he was going to see some shows, but I hear he hasn’t left the Grosvenor since he got there.”

I stopped walking. Paddy was a friend—or so I’d thought.

Hints and threats I had—answers were in short supply. Maybe I had not retraced my steps far enough. I had to talk to Virgil Von Becker—without Everett.

I
f I stood up and leaned over the heads of the motherly chaperone and three teenage girls—all of whom were entirely caught up in the action on stage—I could just see the Kid down in row E, one seat off the aisle. When I sat down, however, I could see only the back of the stage. “Partially Obstructed View.” Last row of the upper balcony. I had a great view of the stagehands attaching the flying harness to the back of the vampire’s costume just before he flew up and scared off all the werewolves.

Ten minutes into Act I and I was lost—thoroughly. The audience must have all read the book—or the whole trilogy. There was no dialogue—the lyrics drove whatever story line existed. The music had been written—if that’s the word—by a pair of aging rockers, one of whom had famously admitted years earlier that he knew only three chords when they started out. I was sure that his musical knowledge had doubled over the years.

But my confusion couldn’t be blamed solely on the play—my mind was elsewhere. I sneaked my cell phone out of my pocket and checked for messages—it was set to vibrate. Still nothing from Virgil—three calls in, none returned. The light from the screen attracted a nasty look from the overweight, balding man to my right. I smiled at him and nodded companionably. I’d caught him nodding sleepily halfway through the overture.

The damn phone shook in my hand. Incoming. Virgil.

I jumped up, and no longer bothering to smile, wiggled my way out of the row. I took a quick look down at the Kid before I dashed for the exit—I could barely see him. About all I could tell was that he was there and not on fire. I would have seen the flames.

“Virgil. Thanks for finally getting back to me.” I stopped just outside the doors, at the top of the stairs.

“I’ve been getting Everett’s reports.” In other words, “Why are you bothering me?”

“I need some answers. There’re way too many players on the field. I’m getting worried that someone is going to get hurt.”

“You are being both cryptic and alarmist. Is this about Mr. Castillo again? I have already said that I do not know the man to be a client of the firm. I know who he is and what he represents. I have asked Everett to go through my father’s phone logs and calendars for any evidence that they did business together. As of yesterday afternoon, when I last spoke with Everett, he had no reason to think they even knew each other.”

“He may have to dig deeper. Tell him to talk to Mrs. Welk.”

The sound of muffled applause came through the doors and I went farther down the stairs.

“Welk? The clerk?”

“Yes.”

“All right,” he said, sounding like I had asked him to eat raw garlic. “Is there anything else?”

“Plenty. Some nasty guys have been threatening people I’ve talked to—and claiming that I sent them.”

“And you didn’t?”

I swallowed the profanities that were about to start rolling off my tongue. “No. I don’t work that way.”

“Could it be this Castillo person?” He made the name sound like a particularly noxious form of fungus.

“I don’t know. Also, I’m being followed.”

“By whom?”

“The SEC.”

Virgil paused. Then he spoke carefully. “That is unlikely. Their investigators are accountants. They can be unpleasant, but they are not thugs or undercover men. Are you sure you’re not projecting?”

He meant fantasizing. But he was right. The whole interview with Gibbons had been wrong for someone from the SEC.

“I caught him following me. Two days later, he approached me and showed ID. Then he tried to warn me off,” I said.

“He gave you his name?”

“Charles Gibbons.”

“I will have Everett look into it,” he said.

“He also told me to ask you about Serge Biondi.”

He paused again. “Who?”

“Biondi. A Swiss lawyer your father used. He’s dead.”

“There is some mistake. That’s not how things work here. We have a New York firm that handles everything for us. If we need representation in another country, they handle it.”

“Unless . . .” I left it dangling.

“Ah. Exactly,” he purred. “You think you have found a clue to the missing funds.”

“I’m not ready to make any projections, Virgil. My sources are unreliable, either lying or withholding or with such a stake in the game that I would be skeptical if they told me the sun was out. And I’ve had a lot of people tell me I’m an idiot.”

“What is the lawyer’s name again? I’ll have Everett check.”

“Hold up on that, would you?” I said. “I want to do a bit more research of my own first.”

“You’re not concerned about Everett, are you? He has my complete confidence.”

I was concerned about everyone at that point. Everett was as high on my list of unreliables as anyone else I had spoken to. And that list also included Virgil.

“Not at all. Just give me a few days.”

I walked down the stairs, rather than back up. The second-floor lounge had a bar, and given the choice of a cold beer or returning to listen to a chorus of howling werewolves rhyme “evisceration” with “permanent vacation,” I bellied up.

“A light beer,” I ordered. “Any light beer.”

Tinny speakers over the bar ensured that even here I could not entirely escape the constant 4/4 rock beat. The writers may have discovered a fourth or fifth chord, but they still knew only one beat.

A sixty-something bartender in a black vest and white shirt poured me an eight-ounce glass of beer and made my ten-dollar bill disappear. He looked familiar.

“Are you an actor, by any chance? Could I have seen you on
Law and Order
?”

He laughed in a gleeful, high-pitched cackle. “Nah. I know you, though. From the old P-and-G. I was a runner for Vinny. I’d come by every afternoon to lay off my book. I saw you there sometimes. You and the little guy. Whatsisname?”

“Roger. I’m Jason.”

We shook hands. “Antony. People who don’t know me call me Tony.”

“I’ll remember that,” I said. “I haven’t seen Vinny since they moved the bar uptown. Six months? How’s he doing?”

Vinny the Gambler. Vinny had occupied the last barstool against the wall at P&G for as long as I had been going there. He had been more Roger’s friend than mine, but I thought I knew the man. He sat with his
Racing Form
and notebook and watched the overhead television screens all day. I had always pegged him for a well-dressed retiree. Then my FBI buddies, Brady and his old boss, informed me that Vinny ran one of the biggest sports books in the Northeast out of a second-floor office on Seventy-second Street.

He pursed his lips. “You didn’t hear?”

“No one’s heard. It’s like he dropped through a trapdoor.” PaJohn and Roger had gone by the betting parlor on Seventy-second Street, but hadn’t learned a thing.

“Trapdoor is just about right. He’s serving three years in a minimum-security lockup upstate. The Feds shut down his offshore casino. They let him take a lesser plea. He’s got another two and a half to go. But they’ll be watching, busting his chops. He’s out of business, I think.”

“That’s rough,” I said, but Vinny had been running a book for thirty years or more. The odds have to catch up with you at some point. “But he can do three years.”

“Oh, sure. He can do three with his head in the toilet. It’s a shame, though. He always played straight, made his payoffs, never got greedy. Then the Internet comes along and he’s got a choice to make—go with it or go out of business, right? It sucks, ’cause now it’s a federal rap and there’s no one willing to take an envelope and look the other way.”

“The Feds can’t be bought?” I sounded more than a little skeptical.

“It’s not the same. Senators you can buy. FBI agents? Ya gotta be careful.”

“Where is he?”

“Otisville.”

My hands felt instantly moist and my scalp felt tight.

“I know Otisville,” I said. Otisville was where I had served my last six months in the system.

“Nice place, if ya gotta do time.”

“I suppose I should take a run up there sometime,” I said. “See how Vinny’s doing.” Though the very idea gave me a case of the creeps, it made some sense. Vinny might be just the person to give me some perspective on my investigation. He had done it before.

“Do that. Tell him Antony remembers.” He cocked his head to the side. “What the hell is that?”

I heard it, too. One of the male leads had been moaning about not having the necessary mojo to defeat the forces of evil. As an aria, it was slow, doleful, and boring, and could be improved only by major surgery. But that wasn’t what made it weird.

A second voice had joined. A sobbing, single-note drone in counterpoint to the hero. A voice filled with infinite sadness, yet young, and therefore eerie beyond words. I knew that voice.

“Oh, no.”

I dashed out, down the stairs and through the double doors into the theater.

There was an ancient, wide-bottomed and slow-moving usher ahead of me, starting down the aisle, flashlight at the ready, prepared to deal with whatever rude patron was committing such a mortal sin in her theater. It was my son, and she was not prepared for him at all.

“’Scuse me,” I whispered, executing a perfect three-step cutout. She had to stop or trip over me. I gained another two steps on her.

The song came to an end. A tall, handsome, shirtless man with six-pack abs that made me hate him on sight was center stage, holding a silver sword aloft and awaiting the expected thunderous applause. In that hyper-still, breathless split second following the last dying note and before the first exuberant clap, a young voice cried out—screamed—in excruciating, existential pain, “WHY DON’T THEY JUST TELL THE STORY?”

The applause never arrived. Instead, the audience took a collective breath of amazement and released it with a howl of laughter. The guy with the sword glared out through the lights, seeking the face of his tormentor, amazed to be so attacked from the really expensive seats. His massive chest writhed with contained anger, his hands clenched in frustration. In the wings, a werewolf howled—with laughter.

The Kid began grunting, thunderous sounds that could not in anyone’s imagination be issuing forth from such a tiny body. “Unh! Unh! Unh!”

I almost made it. I was two rows away and closing fast, when Angie broke. She stood up, her sticklike arms flailing, her head making that forward-backward bob like a cottonmouth getting ready to strike.

“You MAY not behave in that way, young man. Do you hear me? You MAY not. Now get yourself up out of that seat. NOW! You will come with me. NOW!”

She reached down to grab him.

I touched her shoulder with my fingertips. “No. Don’t.”

She whirled on me. “Take your hands off me!”

“Let me do this, Angie. I’ve got him. Come on, Kid. Ice cream.”

He stopped grunting, and for a moment looked my way. Then his eyes closed and he began to rock back and forth. The chance for a quick and effective intervention slipped away.

“He is out of control,” she yelled at me, doing her best to demonstrate that while she, too, was out of control, it was all my fault that our son was wigging out.

“Let the lady be,” a voice behind me said. I turned. A burly man in a Hawaiian shirt was close enough to violate any sense of personal space. His hands were down at his sides, and he was leading with his gut. It’s a pose meant to intimidate, but between prison gangbangers and derivatives traders, I’d already been intimidated by experts.

“That’s my son, sir.”

He pushed forward, crowding me and closing in. “I’m telling you, fella. You leave the lady alone.” Do all frail-looking, beautiful women attract misguided Sir Galahads? Was it a pheromone thing? Or was it just Angie?

I stepped into him. His eyes registered surprise, then shock. I had dropped my right hand down to his crotch and grabbed his balls through his Tommy Bahama, razor-creased, silk-blend dress pants.

“You’re out of your fucking league, Cujo. Now, back the fuck up, or I take these home with me.”

He backed up two steps and flopped down in his seat. I turned back to Angie. She was standing in the middle of the aisle, hands on hips, ready to take me on. The usher arrived and managed to shine her flashlight directly in Angie’s eyes.

“Please return to your seat, Miss.”

Angie swatted the light away. The flashlight dropped to the floor and went out.

“Stay out of this, Jason. I can discipline my child without your interference, thank you.”

The orchestra had started up again, a duet of violins and cello meant to convey tension and menace. The he-man, with one last angry look our way, exited stage left. The lights dimmed and four coffins opened, revealing the green-lit vampire family. The audience, most of whom had lost interest in our little drama once the Kid stopped grunting, all ooohed as the vampires rose into the air and began to sing.

I ignored Angie. I leaned across the Kid and spoke to Tino. “I’m getting him out of here. Call me. Maybe we can still meet up later.” He nodded. Mamma paid no attention; she was staring at the stage in wonder.

Angie looked like she was building up steam for a full-out verbal assault; I didn’t give her time to explode.

“Let’s talk about this out front,” I said, swooping the Kid up into my arms. He wriggled in preparation for some animal defense, and I hugged him to me and ran.

The usher was shuffling along the aisle, trying to find the missing flashlight—her badge of office—with her feet. She saw us coming and hopped out of the way. I kept moving. Angie had stopped to collect her purse and Saks shopping bag, but I could feel she was gaining quickly.

The Kid twisted around in my arms when I stopped to negotiate the double doors. For a moment, his head was free. A moment. That’s all it took. He lunged and sank his teeth into my chest.

I did not scream, but I wanted to. It hurt. I pressed his head into my chest, so he wouldn’t be able to shake it, an action he was capable of that most closely resembled what a dog does with a squeaky toy.

Once out onto the street, Angie allowed herself to explode.

“Put him down! I am going to talk some sense into that child. This is how you let him behave? Screaming at the top of his lungs like that? I suppose this is more of the ‘therapy’ that I wasn’t getting him. You are a hypocrite, Jason. A sanctimonious hypocrite. Turn him around. Now! I want him to look me in the eye when I’m talking.”