I got up to shake hands as Andy made the introductions.
The woman was Catherine Dwyer, Andy’s law partner. Kitty was of medium height with thick, dark hair cut short and that luminous Irish complexion, like Spode porcelain. She was very trim in a silk pants suit, but she would have turned heads if she’d been wearing jeans and a baggy sweatshirt. I felt awkward and foolish all of a sudden, as if we were on a first date.
The guy was Max Quinn, a big beefy job with a white sidewall haircut. He looked like an ex-cop, which is what he turned out to be, a private license who did legwork for Ravenant & Dwyer.
“Jack Thibault,” he said, grinning. “I hearda you. You’re the hockey player’s brother.”
“That’d be me,” I agreed.
“What’s the pitch?” he asked.
Andy gave them a quick outline, nothing about the cancer, just the fact that someone seemed to be using his grandfather to get at him.
Both of them picked up on it without needing more.
“Current caseload, what do you think?” Kitty asked, turning toward Max Quinn.
He pulled a face. “There’s that little squirrel Donnie Argent,” he told her. “He’s tight with those bums in Revere, or he’d like us to think.”
“Ring of chop shops,” Kitty explained to me. “Who else?”
“The dopers over in Charlestown,” Max said.
“That’s one of mine,” Andy told me. “Kids just getting into the heavy. Too scared to roll over on their wholesaler and plead out.”
“I don’t blame them,” Quinn said. “That’d be Chip McGill.”
“Something there?” Kitty asked him.
He shrugged. “You know that neighborhood, they’re like the freaking Sicilians — omérta — or, anyway, before the made guys started falling over their own feet, they were in a rush to rat each other out to the feds.”
“Everybody dummies up,” Kitty said to me. “Even these kids know better than to drop a dime on their connections.”
“Who’s Chip McGill?” I asked.
“Dealer,” Quinn said. “Methamphetamine, mostly. Roofies, angel dust, some psychedelics. Party animal. Runs with a bunch of Hell’s Angels wannabes, call themselves the Disciples.”
“I thought they were out of Springfield,” I said.
Quinn gave me a reappraising look. “Good call,” he said.
“You figure they might be looking to open up a new market?” I asked him.
He nodded. “McGill’s a local boy, grew up around Monument Square. Been in the rackets since God was a child. He cuts his overhead, he can get crystal direct from the source. It’s a symbiotic relationship.”
Symbiotic wasn’t the kind of five-dollar word I expected to be in Max Quinn’s vocabulary. It must have shown on my face.
He grinned. “It’s what you get, you hang around with these college kids,” he said.
McGill and the bikers sounded promising, and I said so.
“I see a downside to this,” Kitty Dwyer said.
Quinn and I looked at her.
“If it doesn’t have anything to do with McGill and Jack starts sniffing around him, it’s going to raise a red flag,” she said. “We could regret it.”
“McGill’s got no reason to think our clients are about to testify against him,” Andy put in, “and we wouldn’t want to give him one, but that’s the lawyer in me talking.”
“Makes our situation a little ticklish,” Quinn observed.
He didn’t actually seem that bothered by it. I figured his way would be to jam McGill up and take whatever came next.
Kitty thought the same, apparently. “You know, Max, a full frontal assault might be counterproductive,” she commented.
“Shortest distance between two points,” he said. “You got your Polish grandfather on the one hand, and you got Chip McGill on the other. I’d sooner take McGill off the board.”
“So would I,” Andy said. “I know we’ve got an obligation to those kids, Kitty, they’re our clients, but if Chip McGill is trying to muscle Papa Stan, I vote we ask him about it.”
“Ask?” Quinn didn’t sound too thrilled.
“Feel him out, I mean,” Andy said. “If he’s got legitimate concerns, we put his mind at rest.”
It sounded a little too much like a euphemism for me. Andy seemed to be giving Quinn the go-ahead to lean on McGill.
“Your grandfather went to Jack, remember. He didn’t come to you,” Kitty said. “Maybe he doesn’t want us involved.”
Quinn gave her a sleepy glance.
“Well?” Andy was looking at me. “What do you say to that, Jack? You want to fly solo?”
“Give me a day, maybe,” I said.
“Max?” Andy asked him.
“No problem,” Quinn said.
“Watch your step,” Kitty Dwyer said to me.
Did she mean with Max or McGill? I wondered.
“You’ll keep us in the loop?” Andy asked.
“Of course,” I said.
Kitty walked me out, leaving Quinn and Andy together. She could have wanted a minute alone with me, and she seemed to be making up her mind whether or not to tell me something. We were out on the landing at the top of the stairs when she spoke up.
“It might be personal,” she said.
“You mean, nothing to do with one of the law firm’s cases?” I asked.
She nodded.
“Andy have any skeletons in his closet?”
“I’m not the one to ask,” she said, which only suggested to me that she was.
“If you think of something, will you give me a call?”
“I was thinking I’d call you anyway,” she said, smiling.
I wasn’t quite sure what to make of that, but I was all too aware of her eyes on my back as I went down to the street.
I’d parked over by India Wharf. I was walking back along the waterfront toward my car when I passed an espresso bar with an outside deck and decided to get a cup of coffee. I went in and ordered a latte and took it out onto the deck, where I could sip it and look at the harbor.
It was Indian summer, late October, when the nights are crisp but during the day it can be almost balmy. The sky was nearly cloudless, and sunlight glanced off the oily water. Herring gulls swooped for floating trash and fought over it when they got something. A container ship moved down the channel, headed out toward the bay. It might be going up the coast to the Maritimes or south through the Cape Cod Canal to New York or the mouth of the Chesapeake.
There is a romance to ships, to cast off on a voyage and leave the land behind. The sea is a different place, with different rules, where the hopes and vanities of men have small effect. The kinds of problems I dealt with in my line of work usually boiled down to basic, base motivations. Envy. Lust. Greed. They might seem like primal forces of nature to the people they took possession of, but if you balanced them against the brute power of the North Atlantic, they stood for nothing.
It helped to put things in a healthier perspective. I thought about Stanley in the belly of a bomber, where life could be measured in moments, the flak and the German fighters, the odds against survival. I finished my coffee and turned away from the briny smell of the harbor, the moving water slopping at the pilings, and went inside to use the pay phone.
I called a cop I knew downtown. Frank Dugan owed me a favor, and I was lucky enough to catch him at his desk. There was an open case file on the Disciples, he told me, going back a few years.
“They’re a pretty strong presence, the Springfield-Hartford corridor, out in the Berkshires, too,” Dugan said. “A while back DEA and the state cops ran an operation against them, shut down a lot of their traffic, busted some cookers, but the gang bounced back. That’s the trouble with speed. Doesn’t take much to set up a lab once you figure a way to mask the odors.”