“What about Amanda? You don’t think you owe her?” She held her thumb and index finger a whisker from touching. “Just a little bit?”
“No,” I said. “Take care, Bea.” I walked toward the turnstiles.
“You never asked about him.”
I stopped. I dug my hands deeper into my pockets. I sighed. I turned back to her.
She shifted her weight from her left foot to her right. “Lionel. He should have been out by now, you know, a normal guy like him. The lawyer told us when we pled guilty that he’d be sentenced to twelve years but only do six. Well, that was the sentence. They told the truth about that.” She took a step toward me. She stopped. She took two steps back. The crowd streamed between us, a few people giving us looks. “He gets beat up a lot in there. Worse things, too, but he won’t talk about that. He isn’t meant for a place like that. He’s just a sweetie, you know?” She took another step back. “He got in a fight, some guy trying to take whatever my husband didn’t want to give? And Lionel, he’s a big guy, and he hurt this guy. So now he has to do the full twelve and he’s almost done. But they’re talking about new charges maybe unless he turns rat. Helps the feds with some gang that’s running drugs and things in and out of there? They say if Lionel doesn’t help them, they’ll mess with his sentence. We thought he’d get out in six years.” Her lips got caught between a broken smile and a hopeless frown. “I don’t know sometimes anymore, you know? I don’t.”
There was no place for me to hide. I held her eyes as best I could but I eventually dropped my gaze to the black rubber flooring.
Another group of students walked behind her. They were laughing about something, oblivious. Beatrice watched them go and their happiness shrank her. She looked light enough for the breeze to toss her down the stairs.
I held out my hands. “I don’t do independent work anymore.”
She nodded at my left hand. “You’re married, uh?”
“Yeah.” I took a step back in her direction. “Bea, look—”
She held up a hard hand. “Kids?”
I stopped. I didn’t say anything. I couldn’t find the words suddenly.
“You don’t have to answer. I’m sorry. I am. I was stupid to come. I just thought, I dunno, I just . . .” She glanced off to her right for a moment. “You’re good at it I bet.”
“Huh?”
“I bet you’re a real good father.” She gave me a wadded-up smile. “I always thought you would be.”
She turned into the crowd exiting the station and vanished from my view. I went through the turnstile and down the stairs to the subway platform. From there I could see the parking lot that led out to Morrissey Boulevard. The crowd streamed from the stairwell onto the asphalt, and for a moment, I saw Bea again, but just for a moment. Then I lost sight of her. The crowd was thick with high school kids, and most were taller than her.
Chapter Four
My commute was only four stops on the Red Line. Still, when you’re crammed into a moving can with a hundred other people, four stops can wrinkle a suit pretty good. I exited South Station and shook my arms and legs in a futile attempt to restore luster to my suit and topcoat, and then I walked over to Two International Place, a skyscraper as sleek and heartless as an ice pick. Here, on the twenty-eighth floor, sat the offices of Duhamel-Standiford Global.
Duhamel-Standiford didn’t tweet. They didn’t have a blog or pop up on the right side of a Google screen when someone typed in “private investigation greater boston.” Not to be found in the Yellow Pages, on the back of Security and You magazine, or begging for your business at two A.M. between commercials for Thighmaster 6000 and 888-GALPALS. Most of the city had never heard of them. Their advertising budget amounted to the same number every quarter: 0.
And they’d been in business for 170 years.
They occupied half of the twenty-eighth floor of Two International. The windows facing east overlooked the harbor. Those facing north peered down on the city. None of the windows had blinds. All doors and cubicles were constructed of frosted glass. Sometimes, in the dead of summer, it made you want to put your coat on. The typeface on the glass entrance door was smaller than the door handle:
Duhamel-Standiford
Suffolk County, MA
Estab. 1840
After I was buzzed through that door, I entered a wide anteroom with ice-white walls. The only things hanging on the walls were squares and rectangles of frosted glass, none more than a foot wide or tall and most in the seven-by-nine range. It was impossible to sit or stand in that room and not suspect you were being watched.
Behind the sole desk in that vast anteroom sat a man who’d outlived everyone who could remember a time when he hadn’t sat there. His name was Bertrand Wilbraham. He was of indefinable age—could have been a weathered fifty-five or a sprightly eighty. His flesh reminded me of the brown bar soap my father used to keep in the basement washroom and, except for two very thin and very black eyebrows, his head was hairless. He never even sported a five-o’clock shadow. All male employees and subcontractors of Duhamel-Standiford were required to wear a suit and tie. The style of said suit and tie was up to you—although pastels and floral prints were frowned upon—but the shirt had to be white. Pure white, no pinstripes, however subtle. Bertrand Wilbraham, however, always wore a light gray shirt. His suits and ties changed, hard as it might have been to tell, from solid grays to solid blacks to solid navies, but the gray, protocol-busting shirts remained the same, as if to say, The revolution will be dour.
Mr. Wilbraham did not seem terribly fond of me, but I took comfort in knowing he didn’t seem terribly fond of anyone. As soon as he buzzed me in that morning, he raised a small pink phone memo from his immaculate desktop.
“Mr. Dent requests your presence in his office as soon as you’ve arrived.”
“I’ve arrived.”
“Duly noted.” Mr. Wilbraham opened his fingers. The pink sheet of paper dropped from his hand and floated into the wastebasket.
He buzzed me through the next set of doors and I went down a hallway with a dove-gray carpet. Halfway down, there was an office used by subcontractors like me when we had to log office hours on behalf of the company. It was empty this morning, which meant I had squatter’s rights. I entered and allowed myself the brief fantasy that it would be mine, permanently, by day’s end. I cleared the thought from my head and dropped my bags on the desk. The gym bag held my camera and most of my surveillance equipment from the Trescott job. The laptop bag held a laptop and a photo of my daughter. I unholstered my gun and placed it in my desk drawer. It would stay there until day’s end, because I like carrying a gun about as much as I like eating kale.
I left the glass box and walked the dove-gray hallway up to Jeremy Dent’s office. Dent was vice president of labor relations and the man who’d first subbed work out to me two years ago. Before that, I’d worked independently. I’d had a rent-free office stuffed in the belfry of St. Bartholomew’s Church. It was a thoroughly illegal arrangement between me and Father Drummond, the pastor. When the Archdiocese of Boston had to start paying the piper for decades of covering up child rape by sick priests, they sent an appraiser to St. Bart’s. Whereupon my rent-free office vanished as completely as the bell that had once resided in the belfry but hadn’t been seen since the Carter presidency.
Dent came from a long line of Virginia gentlemen soldiers and had graduated third in his class at West Point. Vietnam, War College, and a quick climb up the armed forces career ladder had ensued. He drew command duty in Lebanon in the mid-eighties, came back home, and pulled the plug. Walked away from the whole deal at thirty-six and the rank of lieutenant colonel, for reasons never fully understood. He crossed paths with old family friends in Boston, the kind whose ancestors had carved their names in the galley planks of the Mayflower, and they mentioned an opening in a firm that few in their circle ever mentioned until things got dire.
Twenty-five years later, Dent was a full partner. He had the white colonial in D
over and the summer place in Vineyard Haven. He had the beautiful wife as well as the firm-jawed son, two willowy daughters, and four grandkids who looked like they spent after-school time posing for Abercrombie ads. And yet he carried whatever had chased him out of the service like a nail in the back of his neck. Charming as he was, you never felt fully comfortable with the guy, because he never seemed fully comfortable with himself.
“Come on in, Patrick,” he said after his secretary deposited me at his door.
I entered and shook his hand. The Custom House peeked over his right shoulder while a Logan runway jutted out from under his left elbow.
“Have a seat, have a seat.”
I did, and Jeremy Dent sat back in his, looked out at the city for a minute from his corner office chair. “Layton and Susan Trescott called me last night. They said you took care of the Brandon thing. Got him to show his hand and all that.”
I nodded. “Wasn’t hard.”
He raised a glass of water to that, took a sip. “They said they were thinking of sending him to Europe.”
“That’d go over well with his probation officer.”
He raised his eyebrows to his own reflection. “That’s what I said. And his mother a judge, too. She seemed genuinely surprised. Parenting, Jesus—a million ways to fuck it up, about three ways to do it right. And that’s for the mothers. As a father, I always felt the best I could hope for was to rise to the level of the eunuch with the biggest sac.” He finished his water, and his feet came off the edge of his desk. “Want a juice or something? I can’t drink coffee anymore.”
“Sure.”
He went to the bar beneath a flat-screen TV and pulled out a bottle of cranberry juice, went fishing for some ice. He brought the glasses over, clinked his off mine, and we both drank cranberry juice from heavy Waterford crystal. He returned his ass to his chair, his heels to the desk, and his gaze to the city.
“So you’re probably wondering about your status around here.”
I gave him a soft raise of the eyebrows. I hoped it conveyed I was interested but not pushy.
“You’ve done great work for us, and I did say we’d revisit the idea of bringing you on full-time after you wrapped up the Trescott case.”
“I do recall that, yeah.”
He smiled, took another drink. “How do you think that went?”
“With Brandon Trescott?”
He nodded.
“About as good as we could hope. I mean, we got the kid to tip his hand to us before he could tip it to some tabloid journalist posing as a stripper. I’m sure the Trescotts have already begun re-hiding the assets.”
He chuckled. “They started around five o’clock last night.”
“So, okay, then. I’d say the whole thing went pretty well.”
He nodded. “It did. You saved them a ton of dough and made us look good.”
I waited for the “but.”
“But,” he said, “Brandon Trescott also told his parents you threatened him in his kitchen and cursed him.”
“I called him a moron, if I remember right.”
He lifted a piece of paper off his desk, consulted it. “And a dumbass. And a dumb shit. And joked about his giving people brain damage.”
“He put that girl in a wheelchair,” I said. “For life.”
He shrugged. “We’re not paid to care about her or her family. We’re paid to keep them from taking our clients to the cleaners. The victim? Not our concern.”
“I never said she was.”
“You just said, I quote, ‘He put that girl in a wheelchair.’ ”
“For which I harbor him no ill will. Like you said, it’s a job. And I did it.”
“But you insulted him, Patrick.”
I tried each word out. “I. Insulted. Him.”
“Yeah. And his parents help keep the lights on around here.”
I placed my drink on his desk. “I confirmed for them what we all know—that their son is, functionally speaking, a sub-idiot. I left them all the information they need to go about protecting him from himself so he can keep the parents of a paraplegic from getting their greedy hands on his two-hundred-thousand-dollar car.”
His eyes widened for a sec. “That’s what that thing cost? The Aston Martin?”
I nodded.
“Two hundred thousand.” He whistled. “For a British car.”
We sat in silence for a bit. I left my drink where it was and eventually said, “So, no permanent job offer, I take it.”
“No.” He shook his head slowly. “You’re not comprehending the culture here yet, Patrick. You’re a great investigator. But this chip you’ve got on your shoulder—”
“What chip?”
“What . . . ?” He chuckled and gave that a small toast of his glass. “You think you’re wearing that nice suit, but all I see you wearing is class rage. It’s draped over you. And our clients see it, too. Why do you think you’ve never met Big D?”
Big D was the companywide nickname for Morgan Duhamel, the seventy-year-old CEO. He was the last of the Duhamels—he had four daughters, all married to men whose names they’d taken—but he’d outlasted the Standifords. The last one of them hadn’t been seen since the mid-fifties. Morgan Duhamel’s office remained, along with those of several of the older partners, in the original headquarters of Duhamel-Standiford, a discreet chocolate bowfront tucked away on Acorn Street at the foot of Beacon Hill. The old-money clients were directed there to discuss cases; their offspring and the nouveaux riches came to International Place.
“I always assumed Big D didn’t take much interest in the subcontractors.”
Dent shook his head. “He’s got encyclopedic knowledge of this place. All its employees, all their spouses and relatives. And all the subcontractors. It was Duhamel who told me about your association with a weapons dealer.” He raised his eyebrows at me. “The old man doesn’t miss shit.”
“So he knows about me.”
“Mmm-hmm. And he likes what he sees. He’d love to hire you full-time. So would I. Put you on a partner track. But if, and only if, you lose the attitude. You think clients like sitting in a room with a guy they feel is judging them?”
“I don’t—”
“Remember last year? The CEO of Branch Federated came up here from headquarters in Houston, specifically to thank you. He’s never flown in to thank a partner and he flew in to thank a sub. You remember that?”
Not an easy one to forget. The bonus on that case paid for my family’s health insurance last year. Branch Federated owned a few hundred companies, and one of the most profitable was Downeast Lumber Incorporated. DLI operated out of Bangor and Sebago Lake, Maine, and was the country’s largest producer of TSCs, or temporary support columns, which construction crews used to stand in for support beams that were being restructured or built off-site. I’d been inserted into the Sebago Lake offices of Downeast Lumber. My job had been to get close to a woman with the wonderfully alliterative name of Peri Pyper. Branch Federated suspected her of selling trade secrets to competitors. Or so we’d been told. After I had worked with Peri Pyper for a month, it became apparent to me that she was gathering evidence to prove that Branch Federated was tampering with its mills’ pollution-monitoring equipment. By the time I got close to her, Peri Pyper had gathered clear evidence that Downeast Lumber and Branch Federated had knowingly violated both the Clean Air Act and the False Statement Act. She could prove Branch Federated had ordered its managers to miscalibrate pollution monitors in eight states, had lied to the department of health in four states, and had fabricated the results of its own quality-assurance testing in every single plant, bar none.
Peri Pyper knew she was being watched, so she couldn’t remove anything from the building or transfer it to her home computer. But Patrick Kendall, her drinking buddy and a lowly marketing accounts manager—he could. After two months, she finally asked for my help at a Chili’s in South Portland. I agreed. We toasted our pact with margaritas and ordered another Triple Dipper pl
atter. The next night, I helped her right into the waiting arms of Branch Federated security.
She was sued for breach of contract, breach of fiduciary responsibility, and breach of her confidentiality agreement. She was prosecuted for grand theft and convicted. She lost her house. She also lost her husband, who bailed while she was under house arrest. Her daughter was bounced from private school. Her son was forced to drop out of college. Last I heard, Peri Pyper worked days answering phones at a used-car dealership in Lewiston, worked nights cleaning floors at a BJ’s Wholesale in nearby Auburn.
She’d thought I was her drinking buddy, her harmless flirtation, her political soul mate. As they’d placed the cuffs on her, she’d looked into my face and seen my duplicity. Her eyes widened. Her lips formed a perfect O.
“Wow, Patrick,” she said, just before they led her away, “you seemed so real.”
I’m pretty sure it’s the worst compliment I’ve ever received.
So when her boss, a doughy dickhead with a 7 handicap and an American flag painted on the tail fin of his Gulfstream, came to Boston to thank me personally, I shook his hand firmly enough to make his man boobs shake. I answered his questions and even had a drink with him. I had done all that was asked of me. Branch Federated and Downeast Lumber could continue shipping its TSCs to construction sites all over North America, Mexico, and Canada. And the groundwater and top soil in the communities in which its mills operated could continue to poison the dinner tables of everyone within a twenty-mile radius. When the meeting was over, I went back home and chased a Zantac 150 with liquid Maalox.
“I was perfectly polite to that guy,” I said.
“Polite the way I’m polite to my wife’s sister with the fucking herpes sore under her right nostril.”
“You swear a lot for a blue blood,” I said.
“You’re fucking right I do.” He held up a finger. “But only behind closed doors, Patrick. That’s the difference. I modulate my personality for the room I’m in. You do not.” He paced a circle around his desk. “Sure, we snuffed out a whistle-blower in DLC, and Branch Federated compensated us regally. But what about next time? Who’s going to get their business next time? Because it isn’t going to be us.”