“You mind spending the night, too?”
“They say you get a fresh duvet every day,” Crow said. “Sounds like too good a deal to pass up.”
Then he asked Jesse where he was.
“On my way to Boston,” Jesse said.
“Tell me you’re not going alone to see Roarke?”
“Okay, I won’t tell you.”
He ended the call. He was crossing over the Charles on the Zakim Bridge when he had another incoming call. He thought at first it might be Crow calling him back.
It wasn’t.
“Turns out our interests coincided more than you thought, homey,” Tony Marcus said. “Guy set my fire turns out to be the guy set yours. And did worse than that.”
“Marin,” Jesse said.
“His own self.”
“Where are you?” Jesse said. “I’m nearly in town. I can come to you.”
“Ain’t gonna be no none of that,” Tony said. “Boy’s mine. But he sure can talk, once you put him with Junior.”
Then Tony Marcus told Jesse what Marin had told him.
“So turns out I do need to settle my grudge with Roarke sooner rather than later,” Tony said.
“Me first,” Jesse said.
Eighty
Richie Burke helped him out again. Pretty soon they’d be organizing their own poker night.
Technically it was Richie’s father who’d helped him. As secretive, and elusive, as Liam Roarke wanted to be as he moved from house to house, Desmond Burke had come to know that Roarke’s primary residence was at Monument Square in Charlestown.
Not all that far, Richie told Jesse on the phone, from where Desmond himself lived.
“You’re really planning to show up there alone?” Richie asked.
“I want to tell him what I know.”
“How much of what you know can you prove?”
“Hardly any without a full confession.”
“Anticipating one out of Liam Roarke?”
“Not in my lifetime, or his,” Jesse said. “Maybe I can make it a race to see whose lasts longer.”
“But you know things.”
“Lots.”
The red-brick town house, three stories, was at the end of the block. Biggest in the neighborhood, but not looking terribly different from the other town houses in the row. There was no signage letting the neighbors know that there was a career scumbag in their midst.
But there was.
Desmond had assured Richie that Roarke was home tonight.
“How does he know for sure?” Jesse asked.
“Because he’s Desmond and because he is,” Richie said.
One last time he asked Jesse if he was sure he knew what he was doing.
“This isn’t the Old West,” Richie said.
“Crow says everything is in the end,” Jesse said, and ended the call then.
He drove past Roarke’s house once, saw two black Navigators parked in front. He kept going and went around the block, found a parking place, left his Glock and his phone in the glove compartment. They weren’t going to let him in without patting him down.
The Old West, maybe, just minus a shoot-out.
At least that was what Jesse was hoping.
Maybe this would be more of a high school stare-down, to see who backed up first.
High school again.
When he walked up the block and turned to head up the front steps, the door to the front Navigator opened and two guys in black suits got out. One blew right past Jesse on the steps, turned around at the door. The other got ahead and stopped Jesse with a forearm.
“Before you do something you’re going to regret, I’m a cop,” Jesse said.
“The one who’s going to have regrets if you don’t get your ass out of here is you,” the taller of the black suits said.
Jesse was wearing his old Red Sox hat, jeans, running shoes, and a lightweight black leather jacket that was possibly the nicest article of clothing he owned, a gift from Sunny.
“Beat it,” the guy guarding the door said.
“Not just yet.”
The guy closest to Jesse said, “You want to get in our car, maybe?”
“I don’t get in cars with strangers,” Jesse said.
The man patted him down.
“Now that we’ve got the preliminaries out of the way,” Jesse told them, “one of you ferocious guys go inside and tell your boss that Jesse Stone is here, and that he wants to talk about Tayshawn Leonard. And about the aria Steve Marin just sang for Tony Marcus.”
Nobody said anything until Jesse said, “It’s a solo number at the opera.”
Five minutes later he was inside.
Eighty-One
The two bruisers walked him up a stairway in the front hall. A room that looked to be a combination den and study was in the back, on the second floor. When Jesse stepped into the room, the bruiser Dennis he recognized from the Capital Grille and from the Scupper patted him down again. Obviously the top bruiser. Jesse wondered if he had better benefits.
“If I wanted to shoot you,” Jesse said, “you’d be shot already.” He grinned. “I know a guy.”
“The Indian,” Roarke said from where he sat on the other side of the room.
“Well, yeah,” Jesse said. “But the man can shoot a long gun like Buffalo Bill.”
Roarke was in a big leather chair that barely contained him. Lemon-colored V-neck sweater, what looked like a polo shirt of the same color underneath. Jeans that Jesse was certain were a lot more expensive than his own. Loafers, no socks. The loafers looked softer than the sweater.
Gangster in repose.
Like he was ready if somebody else burst in the door for a photo shoot.
Dennis stood just inside the door, leaning against the wall, arms crossed in front of him. Jesse managed not to look terrified.
There was an antique desk set against the back wall. One chair on each side. Also antique.
“Grab that chair,” Roarke said, nodding at the desk. “Not that you’re going to be here for long. But then neither am I.”
“Running?” Jesse said. “I would. Tony’s got Marin. And Marin told him just who it was who ordered him to burn down some building of Tony’s in Southie and kill one of his guys.” Jesse shook his head. “You bad, bad boy.”
“I’ll be gone in an hour.”
“To a non-extraditable country?” Jesse said.
Jesse sat down so that he and Roarke were facing each other.
“Dennis needs to leave,” Jesse said.
“You don’t tell people what to do in my house.”
“But, see, that’s the thing. I am in your house, Liam. And if you want Dennis to hear what I came here to tell you about your private life, well, that’s your call. Makes no difference to me.”
Now it was a stare-down.
Roarke finally said, “Give us the room, Dennis.”
He likes saying that.
All big guys do.
Before Dennis left Jesse said, “No listening at the door.”
“Fuck off,” Dennis said.
Roarke told Dennis to send men outside to see if Jesse had brought anybody with him.
When it was just the two of them Roarke said, “Now who’s this Tayshawn Leonard?”
He really was a very big man. Somehow bigger in here, in this setting, than he’d seemed the other two times Jesse had been in his presence. The highball glass in his hand looked as small as a shot glass.
“Are we really gonna do this?” Jesse said.
“Do what?”
“Fuck around, Liam,” Jesse said. “I know. Okay? I know. And something you need to know? I don’t give a shit about your sexual preferences. But I know you had a thing going on with Tayshawn, a side deal away from the escort service on the occasion when love wasn’t for sale. What I don’t know is why he had to go away. And go away permanently would be my guess. But that’s just one more thing about which I don’t give a shit.”