R
iding the T from Broadway to Park Street, he texted Abby:
pick up @ 3?
He never called her at school, of course. Nor did he send e-mails; e-mails were for old people, she insisted. Abby texted throughout the day, between classes and even during some classes. She texted with the speed of a court reporter. She used abbreviations and jargon he didn’t understand.
She replied within two minutes:
Thanks but going over to Jenna’s, OK?
No, not okay. No way. Danny texted back:
Not today. I want you at home.
The train went through a tunnel, and cell service was unavailable, and by the time he reached the Park Street stop, he had a voice mail. From Abby. He didn’t even bother listening to the message. He knew she’d be pleading or squawking, or some combination. Only desperation would cause her to resort to the spoken word.
As he crossed the platform to board the Green Line train to Arlington Street, he called her back.
“Daddy,” she answered, voice taut. “Jenna and I are going to study precalc, I swear. I promise we’ll be working.” In the background a girl squealed.
“You can do that at home,” he said.
“But we’re studying together. I mean, like, why do I have to be at home when we’re just going to be on chat?”
“I’d like you to be at home today.”
The DEA guys were right: He couldn’t abruptly pull out of Galvin’s orbit without raising all kinds of suspicion. But Abby was a different story. She was the connective tissue. If she stopped hanging out with Jenna, then he could part ways with Galvin naturally, no questions asked.
He felt like he’d pulled the pin from a grenade and hadn’t yet tossed it.
“I mean,” she said, her voice getting high, “I could ask the driver to take me home at, like, seven, so we can have dinner, okay?”
He could see Esteban’s mutilated head, and he felt nauseated.
“I’ll pick you up at three,” Danny said with finality, and pressed
END
.
Then he called Tom Galvin at his office. “You still free for a game of squash?”
D
anny had walked past the grand old brownstone hundreds of times and had always wondered what was inside. It was a federal-style mansion with a white granite façade, on the steep stretch of Beacon Street facing the Public Garden. The building was wider than its neighbors, with a double bow front.
Its porticoed entrance was unmarked. Just a burnished oak door with a polished brass knob and brass mail slot. Most of the buildings on this block were private residences; Danny had always assumed it was one of those mansions that had been in some Boston Brahmin family since the days of Oliver Wendell Holmes.
It turned out to be the Plympton Club, Boston’s oldest social and athletic club. He’d heard about it but didn’t know anyone who belonged. Until now.
Inside, the creaky floors were covered with oriental rugs, the walls covered with oil paintings of boats and birds. A couple of racks of deer antlers were mounted on the wall. Display cases held yellowed antique squash racquets and sepia photographs of players from early in the last century. According to a piece in
Boston
magazine he’d read online, the Plympton Club had six squash courts, a saline pool, and a court-tennis court, known by racquet snobs as a real tennis court. There was a library and an ornate dining room.
He waited on a hard sofa, gym bag on the floor, and tried to act nonchalant.
His discomfort at being in the Plympton Club was nothing, however, compared to his fear of the device in his gym bag being discovered. And how the hell was he going to get five minutes with Galvin’s BlackBerry? It never seemed to leave his hands.
And if he got caught . . . ?
What happened to Esteban could just as easily happen to him.
Danny found it hard to believe that Tom Galvin, who seemed an affable, genial type, was in any way involved in the unspeakable murder-torture of his own driver. Maybe he didn’t even know about it.
But the people Galvin worked for were brutal and cold-blooded and terrifying. They wouldn’t hesitate to do to Danny what they’d done to Esteban.
If he were caught.
He had to be extremely careful. If there was the slightest chance of being caught, he had to back out of it.
The young blond woman behind the reception desk smiled at him and resumed stamping forms or something with an old-fashioned date stamp. A couple of middle-aged business types came in, laughing heartily about a “triple bogey.” They both wore blue blazers with brass buttons. One wore green pants with whales on them. The other wore khakis. They greeted the woman behind the desk, and she waved them through a doorway.
“I kept you waiting,” Galvin called out as he entered from the street.
Danny flinched, startled by Galvin’s voice. “Hardly,” he said, though it had been fifteen minutes.
The twangy guitar riff from “Sweet Home Alabama” played suddenly. Galvin fished his BlackBerry out of the breast pocket of his charcoal chalk-stripe suit.
“Marge, let’s push that up an hour,” he said loudly into his phone. “What? Hold on, the reception here sucks . . . exactly.” He ended the call and shook his head. The young woman behind the desk seemed to give him an annoyed look. “Sorry about that. Just one of those days. You got your gear?”
Danny lifted the gym bag by way of reply. “Everything I need. What’s with the ringtone, by the way? Some Alabama connection or something?”
He shrugged. “I like Lynyrd Skynyrd. ‘Gimme Three Steps’? ‘Free Bird’?”
Danny smiled. “Sure.”
“Didn’t you ever want to play guitar in a rock ’n’ roll band?”
“Sure, who hasn’t?”
They rode a small elevator down.
“Cell phone use is officially frowned on here,” Galvin muttered, sounding chastened. “It’s
not done
.” He affected the lockjaw used by Thurston Howell III in
Gilligan’s Island
.
“Impressive place,” Danny said.
“I prefer to use the word
insufferable
,” Galvin said. “But it’s convenient to my office.”
“
My
gym doesn’t have antlers on the wall.”
“Well, this place doesn’t have blacks, Jews, or women. Or Italians or Irish. With the glaring exception of me. Man, having me as a member is such a hair up their ass.” He beamed.
“Whose?”
“The stiffs who run this mausoleum.”
“They let you in.”
“They had no choice. They had to.”
Danny looked at him. The elevator descended sluggishly, juddering.
“You know, you can’t even apply for membership here. You get ‘tapped.’ You get nominated, and then they sound you out, then they interview you. You have to have dinner with the whole damned governing board, one at a time. Like an endless goddamned colonoscopy.”
“I guess you charmed them.”
“Charmed them? I saved their butts. This place was going under. The roof was literally caving in, but they didn’t have any funds in reserve to repair it, and the old boys refused to increase membership fees. They were talking about selling off part of the building or even shuttering the club altogether. So I stepped in and bailed them out. Made a long-term loan on generous terms.”
“In exchange for membership,” Danny said, smiling. “An offer they couldn’t refuse.”
Galvin grinned. The elevator opened on a low-ceilinged corridor that smelled faintly of eucalyptus. “Turned out I had all the right qualifications.” He lowered his voice, even though there didn’t seem to be anyone within earshot. “These a-holes think they’re better than anyone else because they didn’t have to work for their money. Great-grandfather earned it, which makes them aristocrats or something. Whereas guys like me from Southie, went to BC, whatever whatever, who have the chops to earn our own money, we’re gonna get blackballed. . . .” His voice trailed off as a silver-haired older man passed by in a madras jacket with plaid pants. The man nodded and said, “Tom.”
Galvin nodded back.
“I saw that e-mail about the Galvin Fitness Center at Lyman,” Danny said. A notice had gone out from Lally Thornton’s office announcing plans for the new pool, track, and athletic facility, thanks to a generous gift from Thomas and Celina Galvin.
Galvin pushed open the heavy door to the men’s locker room. He sighed, grabbed a couple of towels, and tossed one to Danny. “Sometimes you gotta grease the wheels. No other school was willing to take her in for junior and senior years.”
He stopped at an attendant’s desk.
“¿Hola,
José
,
”
he said,
“que tal?”
“Pues muy bien,
Sr. Galvin
,
”
the moon-faced, chubby attendant replied, handing Galvin a locker key on an elastic loop.
“¿Y usted?”
“¡Bien, bien . . . ya sabes como va la vida!”
Danny wasn’t surprised that Galvin spoke Spanish, being married to a Mexican woman. But he seemed to speak with the fluency of a native. That surprised him.
“Sweet Home Alabama” came on again. Galvin pulled his BlackBerry out of his suit, gave José an apologetic smile, and headed toward a long bank of lockers.
“An hour, an hour and a half at the most,” he said into the phone. “We good? Okay.”
He hit
END
and put it back into his suit jacket pocket.
“That’s how the world works,” he said, as if the conversation had never been interrupted. “Sorta like your robber barons. Vanderbilt and Carnegie and Rockefeller and Morgan—it took a couple of generations to wash the stink out of that money, right?”
“True.”
“Why are those guys ‘robber barons,’ anyway? Why aren’t they entrepreneurs?”
“Excellent question.”
“I mean, were they any different from Steve Jobs or Bill Gates or the guys who founded Google? And didn’t Rockefeller give away billions of dollars? I bet they all did, right?”
“One man’s robber baron is another man’s entrepreneur. Or philanthropist. What about you?”
“What about me?”
“Robber baron or entrepreneur?”
Galvin waggled his head to one side, then the other. Like he was about to deliver a clever reply. But then thought better of it. “I’m an investor.”
“What kind of investor?”
“Private equity. It’s boring.”
“Not to me. Or probably to you.”
He heaved a sigh. As if he’d given this answer a hundred thousand times before. “I manage money for a very wealthy family.”
“Yeah? Who’s that?”
Galvin shrugged. “Do you know the names of the ten richest families in Mexico?”
“No,” Danny admitted.
“Then I don’t think the name would mean much to you.”
• • •
The locker room smelled of burnt towel lint from a dryer nearby, mixed with the smell of some kind of old-fashioned hair tonic, like Vitalis, and underlying it all the odor of musty gym clothes. There was a TV mounted high on the wall in a small lounge area. A stainless-steel refrigerator with glass doors containing an arsenal of dewy water bottles. A long sink counter equipped with combs in tall glass Barbicide jars bathing in blue disinfectant. Disposable razors, cans of Barbasol shaving cream. Rows of old-looking lockers made of dark wood, some with keys in their locks, metal tags dangling from their elastic lanyards.
The locker room was not quite deserted, but close to it. A few voices came from a distant locker bay. As far as Danny could tell, the only employee working the locker room was José the attendant. Not a lot of staff seemed to be employed at the Plympton Club, which fit the profile of a club under some financial duress.
A bull-necked guy in his seventies, powerfully built and covered in gray fur, strutted by totally naked, everything hanging out, towel around his neck.
Danny took note of Galvin’s locker, number 809, and found an available one nearby. Galvin’s gym clothes, he saw, were already in his locker, neatly folded. The club apparently did members’ laundry. A canister of Wilson yellow-dot squash balls on a shelf, a racquet on a hook. Galvin removed his suit jacket and draped it on a wooden coat hanger.
His BlackBerry was still in the breast pocket.
Danny changed into a white undershirt and an old pair of Columbia gym shorts. Galvin’s clothes looked brand-new: white shorts and a red-and-black shirt, both bearing the Black Knight logo. A blindingly white pair of Prince squash shoes.
The two middle-aged businessmen who’d come in before them were now leaving the locker room, squash racquets in hand, still talking golf. They wore old rumpled T-shirts (Harvard Crew and Phillips Exeter) and gym shorts with sagging elastic waistbands. Like they got their clothes from a heap in the homeless shelter where Lucy worked.
“Nice togs, Thomas,” Harvard Crew said.
“Thank you, Landon,” said Galvin.
“Very sharp. Are you playing in the US Open?”
Galvin smiled mirthlessly. He gave Danny a knowing look. Danny was familiar with that kind of faux-friendly rich-guy backstab. He heard it at Lyman, too. Two minutes later the guys would be privately mocking Galvin for his nouveau riche attire. For trying too hard.
Galvin slammed his locker door and turned the key to lock it.
The BlackBerry inside.
G
alvin placed his stuff—his zippered racquet case, his locker key, a new can of balls, a towel—on the ledge outside the glass wall at the back of a court. Danny dropped his racquet case and towel right next to them and kept his locker key in his pocket.
Their warm-up was bumpy. Danny couldn’t settle on a grip. He kept mis-hitting the ball, either wildly high or too low. From the next court over, indecent grunts and moans echoed, like in some porn flick.
Danny was convinced you could tell a lot about someone by how he or she played sports. Was she a ball hog or a team player? Was he a mild-mannered guy who turned into a psycho on the court or the field? Spontaneous, or analytical?
Tom Galvin was deadly serious about his game. That easy wit, that contrarian sense of humor—it was all gone. He was a ferocious player. Not just that he was skilled, which he was—he had a pro’s sense of strategy—but he just didn’t give up a point. In his goggles, Galvin even looked like some kind of evil insect, a praying mantis.
Granted, Danny didn’t put up much in the way of competition, at least not at first. Once he’d been a decent player, at Columbia, but that was too many years ago. He was hardly in peak condition anymore. He was slow. He didn’t maintain control of the T. His serves were too easy.
Whereas Galvin’s serve was killer. He lobbed it in a perfect high arc: a lethal parabola that plopped down in the back corner far behind Danny, hit the nick, and died a nasty little death. Danny lost the first two games in short order before he began to figure out how to answer such a powerhouse serve.
In the third game, Danny finally pulled even with Galvin. Eight all. Then one of Galvin’s shots bounced twice, no doubt about it at all, which gave the serve to Danny and maybe even the winning point. To Danny’s surprise, Galvin picked up the ball and marched to the service box with no discussion.
“Uh, I’m pretty sure that was a double bounce,” Danny said.
“No, it wasn’t,” Galvin said flatly.
“Actually—”
“Ready?” Galvin moved into position to deliver another one of his killer serves. Danny almost persisted, almost said, “I
saw
it,” but decided it wasn’t worth it. Galvin knew damned well the ball had bounced twice. No point in arguing. His club, his ball, his rules.
It occurred to him that, with two guys as competitive as they were, playing squash wasn’t exactly a formula for camaraderie.
On the next point, Danny somehow managed to hit a soft drop shot from the forehand side, in the front right corner. Galvin, a half second late, came crashing into Danny’s left shoulder a split second after the ball hit the nick. He was obviously too late to have retrieved the ball anyway.
“Let,” he said.
Danny laughed. “No way you would have got that.”
“Dude. I called a let. You were in the way.”
His club, his ball, his rules. Danny let it slide.
After Galvin won the third game in a row, he said, “Best of seven?”
“Sure,” Danny said. “But how about a water break first?” He was dripping with sweat. The grip on his racquet was slippery.
“You’re trying to break my rhythm, aren’t you?” Galvin said. Twin rivulets of sweat coursed down either side of his face. “I think you’re trying to mess with my momentum.”
“Hey, whatever it takes.”
Galvin smiled and pushed open the glass door. The air outside the court was chilly, and it felt good against Danny’s face. Galvin grabbed his towel, jingling the locker key, and blotted his face with the towel. He gestured with a floppy wave toward the drinking fountain and headed over there himself.
“Actually,” Danny said, setting his racquet on the floor, “I’ll grab us a couple of cold water bottles, if you don’t mind.”
Galvin waggled a hand without looking back.
Danny stooped down, picked up Galvin’s locker key in what he hoped was one fluid gesture—
an innocent mistake
, he could claim—and went into the locker room.
He didn’t hear or see anyone else there.
He tried locker number 809 and found it locked.
Maybe that’s why they’re called lockers
.
The locker room was still. In the silence he became aware of ambient noise from distant machinery: the wheezing and clattering of an industrial washer and dryer, maybe in a utility room nearby. The rush of water through the ancient sclerotic pipes. The muted whoosh of the ventilation system. A showerhead dripping, plinking, into a puddle on the tiled shower floor.
And over it all, his heart thudding. Faster than normal, but steady. He’d rehearsed this whole thing, had gone through it mentally over and over again, considering every angle he could think of, every possible hitch.
He turned the key and pulled it open, a sense of queasy dread coming over him. Galvin’s locker was orderly. His splendid chalk-stripe charcoal suit hung neatly on a hanger, which had been placed on a hook. On the top shelf was the spare can of Wilson yellow-dots and two neatly folded T-shirts, both new-looking. A very nice pair of cordovan cap-toe brogues, buffed to a mirror shine, had been carefully placed on the locker floor, both toe-in. Inscribed on the tan insole was a signature, John Lobb, probably the shoemaker.
The BlackBerry was in the left inside breast pocket of the suit.
Still no one around.
He couldn’t resist peeking at the label sewn on the inside pocket:
MADE IN ENGLAND BY
ANDERSON & SHEPPARD LTD
SAVILE ROW TAILORS
32, OLD BURLINGTON STREET, LONDON
Then there were some kind of numbers that looked typewritten, and a date: 22/08/11. Danny didn’t know much about the sort of clothes rich people wore, but he knew enough to recognize that a Savile Row tailor was a big deal, and those numbers and that date meant the suit was custom tailored.
Danny slid the BlackBerry out of Galvin’s suit jacket. It was on, but the display said
DEVICE IS LOCKED
. Meaning it was password-protected.
But he’d expected that.
Yeager had assured him that the MobilXtract was able to circumvent passcodes. He glanced at the time. Only two minutes had gone by, which wasn’t bad. Grabbing a couple of water bottles from the cooler in the locker room lounge would be a matter of a minute, a minute and a half. But add in a quick potty break, and four minutes wouldn’t provoke Galvin’s suspicions. Much longer than that, and Galvin would wonder what had happened and might amble back to the locker room to look for him.
So far, so good.
Then he was startled by a sudden blast of music.
The “Sweet Home Alabama” ringtone seemed louder than before. No doubt because it had pierced the stillness. He didn’t remember how to silence the ringer. He didn’t want to answer the call, just wanted it to stop playing Lynyrd Skynyrd. It keep blaring while he grabbed the phone wildly, hitting every button he could find on the sides and on top. Finally the music stopped.
When he heard the voice, he jumped.
José the attendant stood no more than ten feet away. He was a quiet one.
“Can I help you, sir?” he said.