“There was another man,” I say, ignoring the flare in his nostrils. “His name was Dan Parsons.”
“Yeah, makes me look like King fucking Solomon,” he says, fidgeting with his pack of Marlboros.
“Meaning?”
“Got kicked out of his own fucking law firm,” Russo says. “Big fucking deal. Parsons amp; Trout. Dan Parsons this. Dan Parsons that. Oh, they paid him, but they wanted him out. His own firm. Didn’t do a damn thing but file appeals for Raymond White. Went a little batshit, I guess. Then he took every fuckin’ penny he had and got into that dotcom bullshit. Made a fuckin’ fortune, then lost a fuckin’ fortune. Uncle Sam-as in IRS-didn’t get their cut on the upside and last I heard the barbarians were at the gate.”
My eyes are drawn back to the fire. One log sticks up at an angle. On its tip is a fiery brand pulsing orange. I watch until the wood pops and the ember falls and disappears into the ashes beneath the grate.
“How much would it take to get this place into good shape?” I ask. “So you could stop selling pot to kids?”
“Kids? You should see the shit these little bastards do.”
I stare at him without comment.
“Well,” he says, crossing his arms and frowning all the way into the area where his chin mixes with his neck, “I don’t know. If I had, like… two hundred thousand. That would put me in pretty good shape. That’d pay down my loan to where I could get down to Daytona for a week in February or something. Shit, the fucking winter here never ends.”
“Two hundred thousand dollars?” I say.
“Well, you asked.”
I reach into the briefcase and push the gun aside. I take twenty stacks of hundreds out and set them on the table.
“A gift,” I say, “from Seth Cole. In memory of Raymond White… To turn your life around.”
“Hey,” he says, reaching for the money. “Are you fucking kidding me?”
“No,” I say. “I don’t kid. It’s yours.”
“Do I have to claim it?”
A smile creeps onto my lips and I say, “You can do whatever you want with it. It’s yours. No one has to know where it came from.”
“Hey,” he says, peering around the cover of the case as I close it. “How much is in there?”
“There was a million,” I say, rising from my seat and snapping shut the latches on the case.
“What if I said I needed a million?”
“Then I would have given it to you,” I say. “But I was authorized to give you only what you needed to get your business on track so you could live an honest, decent life. Now hopefully you’ll do that.”
“I could use it all,” he says, his voice rising with the rest of him. “Really. I just didn’t want to be greedy, but I need it.”
“If you didn’t,” I say, “then don’t.”
“What?”
“Be greedy,” I say, and leave.
33
WHEN I AWAKE, it’s still dark. I shower and change. I open the door and Bert-playing guard dog-falls backward into the room. He wakes up in a sputter, grabbing for the handle of the Glock in the waist of his pants.
“It’s me,” I say. “Let’s go.”
The boards creak beneath our feet, otherwise there’s no sound. The wind is gone. Outside, it’s frigid. There is a low ceiling of gray clouds that are lit by the glow in the east. We cross the frozen lake and leave our machines in Byrd’s empty lot, and I tell Bert to drive us to Syracuse. After almost three hours, we stop at Cosmo’s diner near the university for breakfast and I order a broccoli and cheese omelet. It is a taste from another life.
Bert asks if he can get a burger this early and the waitress with an earring in her nose shrugs and says sure. I lean out of our booth and ask the woman at the cash register for a phone book. She smiles and takes it out from under the counter.
Bert hops up to get the book, but when he sits down, he puts it in his lap instead of giving it to me and says, “Can I ask you something?”
“Sure.”
“You got all that money now,” he says, “but you don’t do nothing that’s fun.”
“What’s the question?”
“Don’t you want to?”
“Maybe when I finish doing what I have to do,” I say, “I’ll go to Disney World.”
“My grandmother used to say that even a big chief needs to laugh,” he says, “or else it makes his spirit small.”
He’s wearing a crooked smile and extends his beefy fist across the tabletop and says, “Want to wrestle?”
I take his hand and bait him with a chance for a quick win, but I slip out at the last possible second, pin his thumb down, and quickly count to three.
“Best out of three,” he says. “You never win a war with just one battle, and I got the phone book.”
He beats me two in a row, mashing my thumb and rumbling with laughter, then slaps the phone book down on the table.
“Thanks,” I say, rubbing the joint between my first and second digits and opening the book. “My spirit’s now soaring.”
Dan Parsons is listed at a new address in Skaneateles. Elizabeth Street. Nice neighborhood, but nothing like his white Georgian mansion on the lake. There is also an office listed on Fennell Street. After breakfast, we drive out to Skaneateles, where the trees in the village are frosted and the homes and buildings wear fresh caps of snow.
Dan’s office is in the back of the old Trabold’s Garage. Someone has renovated the old stone blacksmith shop and put a restaurant on the ground floor. We park in the municipal lot behind all the stores and buildings. There is a bent old man in a hooded parka and heavy snow boots shoveling the stairs that lead up to the offices.
When we reach the bottom, I notice a tear in the corduroy pants stuck into the top of the man’s boots and say, “Excuse me, we’re looking for Dan Parsons’s office.”
The man stops his shoveling and turns. It’s Dan. His face is pink, either from the cold or embarrassment. Most of his curly white hair is gone. His nose is even more pronounced. His jowls hang limp from his jawbone and the crow’s-feet at the corners of his eyes sag with disappointment. His smile is gone.
“I’m him,” he says, glancing at Bert and then turning his attention back to the shovel. “If you wait a minute, I’ll finish this. What do you got? A house closing?”
I study the profile of his face for the joke. This is a man who brokered billion-dollar deals. A good house closing can net you five hundred.
“No,” I say. “I need to talk with you about the IRS.”
His head snaps up and his eyes seem to droop even more. He presses his lips tight.
“You don’t look like Feds,” he says.
“We’re not,” I say. “I’m here to help.”
“Well, I don’t have any money to pay you,” he says, “so unless you’re with Legal Aid, you might as well not waste your time. When’s the last time you saw a lawyer who had to shovel the steps to help pay his rent?”
“Can we go inside?” I ask.
Dan shakes his head and slowly mounts the stairs. He grips the railing tight through his ski gloves to steady himself. He kicks some of the snow off the landing and we go inside and down a narrow hall. His office isn’t much more than a closet with a desk and a phone. There are two chairs opposite the desk that are wedged between it and the wall. On the wall are pictures of Dan and his wife-fading, but still pretty and trim-and their son, who is now a good-looking young man.
After Dan hangs his parka on the back of the door, I see that his husky shoulders have gone round and his potbelly has become a barrel of flab. He wears an old herringbone blazer that’s too tight around his middle, and beneath the wrapping of his plaid scarf is a yellow paisley tie.
He sits down with a sigh and motions to the chairs. Bert and I sit.
“What do you want?” Dan asks.
“I said I’m here to help.”
“How’s that?”
“How much do you owe the government?” I ask.