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.