Дэвид Гейтс - The Blue Mirror

“Except that he’s past seventy and he’s on heavy medication and he doesn’t know what any of it’s about.”

“So he suppresses his natural instinct to scrub the bricks with this yo-yo’s face, not to mention that he’s maybe no longer the man he once was, and he comes to you.”

“Pretty much.”

Tony pursed his lips. “Where do you start?” he asked.

“I start with Stanley’s grandson.”

“The kid.”

“He’s not a kid, exactly.” In fact, Andy was close to my brother’s age. He was thirty-one, an attorney. Criminal law, unglamorous but always in demand. He’d done a couple of years as a public defender in Suffolk Superior Court, and now he was in private practice, with an address downtown on Milk Street.

“You hoping that dog will hunt?” Tony asked.

“Andy’s more likely to have enemies than his grandfather.”

“Yeah, you’d think so,” Tony said, but he seemed distracted by something, a thought hovering on the periphery.

“What?” I asked him.

“I can’t put my finger on it,” he said. “Maybe if I’d quit chasing after it, it would stop ducking out of sight.”

~ * ~

The offices of Ravenant & Dwyer were at the bottom edge of the financial district, in the shadow of the Customs House tower. It was one of the oldest sections of town, built over again and again, but like the North End or Beacon Hill, you could still see an imprint of how Boston had once been laid out back in the eighteenth century when its commerce depended on shipping and the narrow, crooked streets led down to the harborfront. The traffic then would have been horse-drawn wagons and drays lurching over the cobblestones and the small businesses would have been ship’s chandlers and jobbers, sailmakers’ lofts, and rope factories. It remained a commercial district, outlets for wholesale plumbing supplies and the like at street level, and the tenants in the offices on the upper stories were a similar mix of tradesmen and professionals, but they offered a different range of services these days. Andy’s law office was one flight up, the entry door sharing a small landing with a jeweler and an architectural drafting studio. I had a ten o’clock appointment.

I gave the receptionist my name and sat down to wait.

I’d waited all of forty-five seconds when Andy Ravenant stepped out of an inner office, came through the small wicket that fenced the receptionist off from clients, and stuck out his hand as I got to my feet. We shook hands.

“I remember you and your brother from my grandfather’s body shop,” he told me, smiling.

I had a vague recollection of his father, Stan Jr., but I didn’t remember Andy at all. Of course, if I’d been seven or eight, I wouldn’t have paid much attention to some four-year-old kid if I didn’t have to. I decided not to say that.

He took me into his office. It was small and lined with law books— Massachusetts General Statutes, extracts from federal rulings, bound trial transcripts. We sat down.

“Okay,” Andy said, leaning back and tenting his hands in front of his sternum. “What’s got Papá Stan’s bowels in such an uproar? He’s been evasive with me.”

“Did you know he was dying of cancer?” I asked him. I knew it was sudden, but I couldn’t afford to spare his feelings.

Andy sat up abruptly, his face frozen.

I made an apologetic gesture. “He’s told your grandmother about it, and he told me yesterday,” I said. “I guess he hasn’t gotten around to making it general knowledge.”

“Jesus,” Andy said softly. “I knew he was coming into town for treatments, but I didn’t realize how bad it was. He’s such a tough old bastard. You figure somebody like that’s going to die standing up. He won’t go for being an invalid.”

“Yeah, that’s the way I read it,” I said.

“Why did he come to see you, Jack?”

“Somebody threatened him,” I said. “In actual point of fact, they threatened you. Why they’d go after Stanley I don’t know. It seems sideways, or backwards.”

“What was it about?”

“The guy didn’t say, that’s the trouble.”

“Who was this guy?”

I shrugged. “Some cretin, according to your grandfather. Stanley didn’t give me much to go on, but it sounded like he was supposed to warn you off something.”

“My particular client base, that could mean damn near anything,” Andy said. He picked up the phone and punched one of the intercom buttons. “Hey,” he said, “you got a minute?” He paused and then nodded. “Bring him along,” he said to whoever was on the line, and hung up. “Let’s check it out,” he said.

There was a light tap on the door, and two people came into Andy’s office, a man and a woman.

I got up to shake hands as Andy made the introductions.

The woman was Catherine Dwyer, Andy’s law partner. Kitty was of medium height with thick, dark hair cut short and that luminous Irish complexion, like Spode porcelain. She was very trim in a silk pants suit, but she would have turned heads if she’d been wearing jeans and a baggy sweatshirt. I felt awkward and foolish all of a sudden, as if we were on a first date.

The guy was Max Quinn, a big beefy job with a white sidewall haircut. He looked like an ex-cop, which is what he turned out to be, a private license who did legwork for Ravenant & Dwyer.

“Jack Thibault,” he said, grinning. “I hearda you. You’re the hockey player’s brother.”

“That’d be me,” I agreed.

“What’s the pitch?” he asked.

Andy gave them a quick outline, nothing about the cancer, just the fact that someone seemed to be using his grandfather to get at him.

Both of them picked up on it without needing more.

“Current caseload, what do you think?” Kitty asked, turning toward Max Quinn.

He pulled a face. “There’s that little squirrel Donnie Argent,” he told her. “He’s tight with those bums in Revere, or he’d like us to think.”

“Ring of chop shops,” Kitty explained to me. “Who else?”

“The dopers over in Charlestown,” Max said.

“That’s one of mine,” Andy told me. “Kids just getting into the heavy. Too scared to roll over on their wholesaler and plead out.”

“I don’t blame them,” Quinn said. “That’d be Chip McGill.”

“Something there?” Kitty asked him.

He shrugged. “You know that neighborhood, they’re like the freaking Sicilians — omérta — or, anyway, before the made guys started falling over their own feet, they were in a rush to rat each other out to the feds.”

“Everybody dummies up,” Kitty said to me. “Even these kids know better than to drop a dime on their connections.”

“Who’s Chip McGill?” I asked.

“Dealer,” Quinn said. “Methamphetamine, mostly. Roofies, angel dust, some psychedelics. Party animal. Runs with a bunch of Hell’s Angels wannabes, call themselves the Disciples.”

“I thought they were out of Springfield,” I said.

Quinn gave me a reappraising look. “Good call,” he said.

“You figure they might be looking to open up a new market?” I asked him.

He nodded. “McGill’s a local boy, grew up around Monument Square. Been in the rackets since God was a child. He cuts his overhead, he can get crystal direct from the source. It’s a symbiotic relationship.”

Symbiotic wasn’t the kind of five-dollar word I expected to be in Max Quinn’s vocabulary. It must have shown on my face.

He grinned. “It’s what you get, you hang around with these college kids,” he said.

McGill and the bikers sounded promising, and I said so.

“I see a downside to this,” Kitty Dwyer said.

Quinn and I looked at her.

“If it doesn’t have anything to do with McGill and Jack starts sniffing around him, it’s going to raise a red flag,” she said. ‘“We could regret it.”