I take a seat in the steam room and close my eyes, my head lowered, a towel hanging loosely around my neck. I don’t have much left to sweat out, but what else am I going to do?
If only I hadn’t gotten that call last night…
chapter 22
present
At nine o’clock the next morning someone knocked on my door. When I didn’t answer it, the person knocked harder and shouted through the door, announcing himself as Eric Slaine, a reporter for one of the local Boston papers. I put away the book I had been reading and pushed myself out of the recliner. If Lombard’s boys had figured out where I was living, they wouldn’t bother with a trick like pretending they were a reporter to get me to open the door – they would just kick it down.
I opened the door enough to look out. Standing in the hallway was a kid in his thirties, about my size, dressed casually in jeans and a turtleneck sweater. As thin and short as he was, he was good-looking with thick brown hair and the type of pretty-boy looks a lot of girls go for. He also looked damned pleased with himself as he stood there smirking at me.
He introduced himself again and held out a hand for me. When I didn’t take it, it didn’t deter him in the slightest. All it did was make his expression all the more smug.
“Leonard March,” he said, whistling softly to himself. “I’ve been looking nonstop for you for over a day now. What will it take to let me interview you about what happened outside Donnegan’s Liquors?”
He was lying to me. It couldn’t have been true about him looking nonstop for me, not with how refreshed he looked. He had clearly had a good night’s sleep. He’d also taken the time in the morning to shave and shower, and not a hair was out of place. You could tell he wasn’t someone who was ever going to skimp on his personal appearance. Instinctively, I didn’t like him.
“How’d you find me?” I asked.
“A professional secret,” Slaine said.
“If you were able to find me, others will too, and these will be people who are going to want something other than an interview. So why don’t you quit acting cute and tell me if someone’s selling my address.”
I didn’t need him to tell me that. I already knew somebody was. While it was no mystery that I was living in Waltham, nobody should’ve known my address, at least outside of my prison caseworker, Theo Ogden, and whoever had access to the apartment building’s administrative files. The story I was given about pest maintenance being in my apartment was bullshit. My place had been searched by professionals the other day, and I wanted to know whether Theo or someone else was giving out my address.
Slaine considered what I asked him. “I’ll trade you,” he said. “You give me an interview and I’ll tell you how I found you.”
Looking at him I could feel the heat rising off the back of my neck, especially with how much more smug his smile had gotten.
“If you’re going to be knocking on doors expecting favors from people the least you can do is answer a civil question,” I said. “And show some consideration. What the fuck are you doing knocking on doors at nine in the morning, especially given that people might’ve been working late the night before?”
“You have a job, huh?” he asked pleasantly. “And you’re working nights, too. Mind my asking where?”
I started to close the door on him, but he moved a foot into the doorway to block me, then squeezed his shoulder through the opening. I didn’t fight him as he muscled the door open and pushed his way forward, only stopping when his face was inches from mine.
“I showed you more consideration than you showed the people you murdered,” he said, his voice tight, his breath sour as if he’d been eating chopped herring. He was still smirking at me, but there was no humor in his eyes any more and his skin color had dropped a shade. “About waking you up – I didn’t think there was much chance of that, at least not after talking to prison officials about you and finding out about your sleep habits. So Leonard, let’s quit the bullshit. What’s your cost for an interview?”
“Two things,” I said. “First, tell me how you found me.”
“Fair enough,” he agreed. “I went to every low-rent apartment building starting near Donnegan’s Liquors, and showed your picture around until I found you at this dump. What else?”
“Ten thousand dollars. In cash and off the books.”
He didn’t bat an eye at that price. “I’ll have to talk to my supervisor,” he said. “But for that amount of money we’re going to want a lot more than what went down at that liquor store. We’re going to want to know about your life as a hit man for the mob and your time in prison.”
“Okay.”
He stepped away from the doorway and rolled his shoulders in order to adjust his turtleneck sweater. “Why don’t you give me your phone number so I can call when I get an answer about your price?” he asked.
I shook my head. “Leave me a card and I’ll call you next week.”
He looked like he wanted to argue with me about that, but he reluctantly fished a card out of his wallet and handed it to me. “For ten grand it’s going to have to be an exclusive interview,” he warned me. “You can’t be talking to anybody else.”
I watched him walk away before I closed the door shut. When I gave him that ten grand figure I never expected him to be able to meet it, I just threw out that number to get him away from me. I stared at his card for a long minute trying to decide what to do with it. I wanted to rip it up – I sure as fuck didn’t want to do an interview – but I started thinking about what I could do with ten grand if I could get it paid to me under the table, and Sophie figured in the equation. If it wasn’t for her the money wouldn’t have even been a thought. In the end, I stored the card away instead of tossing it like I had first intended.
There was only one person who knew the truth about any of the things I’d done, and that was me. If they were able to come up with ten grand and I decided to go along with an interview, whatever I gave them would be better put to use as fertilizer.
I had an hour before I was going to be meeting Sophie. I stripped off the ratty clothes I’d put on when I first woke up, took a long shower, shaved, then splashed on some new aftershave I’d bought the evening before. After that, I put on a new pair of slacks, shirt and sweater that I had dropped two bills for at a local department store after I had left Sophie the other day.
I stepped outside and pulled the collar of my leather jacket tight against my neck. The weather had turned colder with the sun nowhere in sight and the skies darkened by thick purplish-grayish clouds. Sophie and I were going to meet in a park near Moody Street. I hadn’t been there before but I followed her directions, walking briskly with my head lowered and my hands buried deep in my jacket pockets.
The park was empty when I arrived there. There wasn’t much to it: a few benches, a swing set, a small area of dead grass. As I made my way to one of the benches I saw Sophie off in the distance. I smiled at that. As good as she’d been so far with the con she still had things to learn. The smart play would’ve been to keep me waiting at least a half-hour to get me more invested. Anyway, I waved to her and she waved back.
Her hair was as much a hornet’s nest as every other time I’d seen her, and she looked even colder than I felt in her threadbare cloth coat and jeans that weren’t in much better shape. I couldn’t help feeling a jitteriness in my stomach as I watched her hustling towards me carrying a paper bag under one of her arms. When she joined me on the bench she handed me the bag while she rubbed her hands together and blew into them. Inside the bag were two large coffees and cream cheese bagels wrapped up in paper. I handed Sophie one of the coffees, then unwrapped a bagel and cream cheese to hand her as well. We sat quietly eating our sandwiches and drinking our coffee, but it was a comfortable quiet. When we were done Sophie commented that it was nice having breakfast with someone for a change, then glanced up at the sky and remarked how it might start raining soon.