“She should talk to my mother,” I said. “Ever since I got shot, she freaks if I don’t answer the phone on the first ring. Nice Jewish boys aren’t supposed to get shot, unless maybe they own a jewellery store.”
“I’m a little curious about that myself,” Ryan said. “I mean, I’m not generalizing or anything, but growing up in Hamilton, every Jew I ever knew, besides the few that got into our thing, they became doctors or lawyers or dentists or went into the family business. Scrap metal, shit like that.”
“Did my mother put you up to this?”
“Come on. How’d you get to be a PI?”
“It’s way too long a story,” I told him. “The Percocet is kicking in.”
“And I’m in the Aerosuites Hotel with nothing to do but listen to the elevators.”
“All right. Let’s just say school never clicked for me. I could follow what the teachers said on any given day, but I could never put it together like my brother.”
“What’s he do?”
“He’s a lawyer, like a good Jew is supposed to be. Very successful. Very responsible. Rarely gets shot on the job. The apple of his mother’s eye.”
“Not your father’s?”
“He died when I was a kid.”
Dante Ryan said nothing. I remembered how his father, Sid Ryan, had been killed by the Hamilton mob when Dante was an infant. I was debating whether to ask him about this when a rather large yawn escaped my lips.
“All right,” Ryan said, “I can take a hint. Anyway, given what happened tonight, I’d be careful if I was you. Get a professional in and change the piece-of-shit lock on your door. Check your car before you start it. Watch your back.”
“I can barely watch my side,” I said. “What about your boss? He figure out yet who warned me on the field?”
“Oh yeah. I told him I was warning him, not you. That a ballplayer was getting too close with a bat.”
“Phil say otherwise?”
“Phil never says more than he has to. Frankly, I don’t know what the fuck he saw.”
“He Marco’s regular bodyguard?”
“One in a series.”
“Are you one of them?”
“Me? No. I don’t guard bodies, I generate them.”
“All right. I’m saying good night now. With the cavalry on speed-dial.”
“More likely you’ll need the bomb squad,” he said.
CHAPTER 20
Buffalo: the previous March
Rich Leckie sagged down onto a bench beside Marty Oliver, raising his T-shirt off his belly to wipe the sweat pouring off his bald head. His stomach was white and soft, rolling out over the band of his shorts.
“It’s official,” he gasped. “I’m dying.”
“You’re not dying,” Marty said.
“You’re right. I’m dead already.”
“That might explain your game tonight.”
“Thanks, pal.”
“Come on, I’m kidding. You’re just out of shape.”
“It’s only a matter of time now.”
“It’s only a matter of time for us all, Tallulah. There’s nothing wrong with you a little more exercise and a better diet wouldn’t cure.”
“Thank you and fuck you,” Rich panted.
Rich and Marty played racquetball every Thursday evening, seven to eight, at the Delaware Avenue Y, a short walk from Marty’s downtown office. But racquetball with Marty was the only exercise Rich got. Marty played racquetball with at least four other guys at the Y, played basketball Sundays in a fifty-plus league, and used the stairclimber and elliptical cross-trainer, sweating it out next to the buff women, chatting up any that didn’t wear iPods.
They had known each other for nearly forty years- though both would probably reel at the thought-meeting in high school and staying friends through college, marriages, children and careers. Well, Marty’s career anyway. Rich wasn’t sure the dogged yet unfulfilling path he had pursued since earning his journalism degree could properly be called a career. Rich and Marty had discovered rock music together in the early sixties, when the potent Buffalo scene was presided over by legendary DJs like Tom James and George Brand, a generation of mesmerized teens following them like rats after plugged-in pipers. Rich and Marty formed their own group in high school-Contraband-with Marty on guitar and vocals and Rich on keyboards, trying to work his long-ignored classical piano training into some sort of blues-based attack. They discovered drugs together, beginning with pot, for which a lifelong affinity would develop, as well as acid, the latter experiment ending abruptly, and almost fatally, when the boys discovered that tripping on blotter was fundamentally incompatible with swimming in the Buffalo River. They had gone on road trips to Manhattan together, spiralling through the Adirondacks in the dark with Dylan’s new electric sound blasting out the speakers and thick smoke trailing out the window. They had tried dealing dope briefly. Extremely briefly, it turned out, as the first toes they stepped on belonged to big, hairy-assed motherfuckers who could rip out their throats with one hand. And those were just the girlfriends.
Asked who his best friend was, Rich would say Marty without hesitation. But he wasn’t sure Marty would say the same. He knew Marty had a lot more friends than he did, a lot more going on in his life, and felt sometimes that Marty looked at him more as a sidekick than an equal. He had to admit Marty was the more accomplished of the two: he hadn’t worked any harder than Rich had in school, but did well enough to get into law school. Back then, Marty’s intention (at least his stated intention) was to practise storefront law, help the underprivileged stick it to the man. Now billboards and bus-stop ads hawked his firm’s personal injury services. Helping people stick it to the man’s insurance company was more like it.
Rich took pride in the fact that he earned his living by writing, even if most of the work was corporate and catalogue copy, and the odd ghost-writing job for local luminaries who thought their lives worth documenting. He did well enough to keep his first and only wife, Leora, and daughter Leigh-Anne in a detached brick house south of East Ferry, but had never kept pace financially with Marty. Rich drove a sensible car that got good mileage, an Acura he’d found in the News, three years old with barely thirty thousand miles on the clock. The Leckies took car trips to visit family and the occasional all-inclusive at a beach resort, thanks mainly to his father-in-law, who was determined that his daughter and granddaughter should have a decent vacation whether or not Rich could provide one.
Marty had a sprawling home east of the Delaware Park golf course, where he lived with his three kids from the first marriage and a foxy second wife half his age. Marty had three imports just for himself (a sleek Jag sedan, a two-seater Benz convertible and an Accord he used strictly for lousy driving conditions or parking in dicey parts of town). The fox had a top-of-the-line minivan for ferrying the kids and a Miata for her downtime. Marty was always leaving for or coming back from some killer holiday. Now that he was managing partner, he let the young associates put in the hours, or made them do it if letting them didn’t do the trick. Just a few weeks earlier, Marty had flown the fox out to San Diego to watch the Buick Invitational, Tiger Woods’s favourite tournament. A few weeks before that it had been a two-week cruise in the Caribbean, with a nanny to run after the kids while he rubbed sunscreen into the fox’s haunches, all while Buffalo was digging out of four-foot lake-effect drifts.
Both men would turn fifty-five this year but only Rich looked it. He had lost his hair early and what little there was left around the ears was grey and coarse. He was five-seven and thirty pounds overweight (forty if you believed Leora). The extra weight made his face look pouchy and he couldn’t wear jeans anymore without looking like a tourist or a narc.