“Yeah. Well, it's the Taj Boston now.”
“You must be workin' for Bill Gates.”
“Not even close.”
“Meet me at eleven tomorrow morning in the Common, corner of Tremont and Park.” Bucca said it as “conna of Tremont and Pack.”
“How will I know you?”
“Fat guy with a Sox cap smokin' a cigar.”
“That sounds like lots of guys in Boston.”
“I'm the ugliest one.”
“Eleven o'clock,” Sam said, and hung up.
“So who was that you were talking to?” Heather asked.
“A local bookie. Recommended by a friend of mine.”
“If you go asking this guy a lot of questions about the World Series, isn't he going to get suspicious?”
“Bookies are born suspicious. But I'm not just going to ask him about the Sox and Cardinals. We'll go over the lines for a lot of games and different sports. He won't know what I'm looking for.”
“He'd better not. Remember, the whole point of your investigation is to keep this story from going public.”
“Look⦔ Sam said, but then thought better of telling her she was a beautiful but useless appendage, that he knew what he was doing, that he understood the assignment perfectly, and if she wanted the job done right she should head back down the stairs.
“What?” Heather said. She cocked her head innocently. “You don't like being told how to do your job?”
“No, I don't. That's why it's called private investigation.”
“But the client pays your salary. You have to satisfy the client, don't you?”
Something about the way she said it caught Sam's ear, and by the expectant expression on her face, Heather knew it.
“Yes,” he said.
“Want a drink?”
Heather reached into her leather bag and pulled out an unopened bottle of Woodford Reserve.
“Compliments of Mr. Kenwood. Do you have some ice?”
“No,” Sam said, after some rapid contemplation about what he might be getting into. “I'll call down for some.”
He picked up the phone and called room service for a bucket of ice.
“Hungry?” he asked Heather, covering the mouthpiece. “I haven't eaten yet.”
“Neither have I. The pan-fried scrod is terrific. And you should ask for the Fireplace Butler.”
“The what?”
“The Fireplace Butler. He brings whatever kind of wood you want, and lights the fire for you. I've always liked the cherry, but birch is quicker.”
Sam put in the order for two servings of scrod and a bottle of Pouilly-Fuissé, and asked to be transferred to the Fireplace Butler. After hearing a rundown on the various woodsâbirch, cherry, oak, and mapleâhe went with Heather's cherry. He was in no hurry. The butler said he'd be right up.
“You do this a lot?” he asked her after hanging up.
Heather was seated in the armchair by the rain-spattered window, her feet up on the ottoman, her blazer unbuttoned, and her shoes on the floor. She couldn't have looked more comfortable if she'd been in a bubble bath in her own home.
“This is my favorite hotel in the world,” she said.
A bellhop knocked on the door and left a bucket of ice. Sam poured a glass of bourbon on the rocks, handed it to Heather, and poured one for himself. She clinked her glass against Sam's and said, “Let's get to the bottom of this.”
“The drink?”
Heather actually laughed. It was a rich, throaty chuckle, which suggested to Sam that perhaps she wasn't the ice queen he'd feared. But despite the drink and the laugh, she was still a business executive who had a $50,000,000 problem to solve. Maybe she was trying to find out whether Kenwood could really trust Sam to do the job. Whatever her purpose for visiting his room, Sam had done as much as he could do for the night, and it was time to unwind a little. If Heather didn't like a detective who was able to relax when he was off the clock, she could go back to the yellow pages.
There was another knock on the door, this time by the Fireplace Butler, a man in a plaid shirt and suspenders, carrying a basket of wood. He displayed a smile of practiced satisfaction, as though he'd just chopped down a cherry tree in the Public Garden, split the wood himself, and carried it up to Sam's room. He opened the glass fireplace doors, arranged the logs in the fireplace and used kindling to begin a small blaze. Sam found a $5 bill in his wallet and handed it to the man, who nodded, put the bill in his pocket and picked up his basket.
“Just call if you need more wood,” the Fireplace Butler said as he left.
Sam picked up the remote and checked the in-house video menu for music channels. They had the usual stale formats: blues, rock, contemporary, country, and smooth jazz. There was also a jack for an MP3 player. He plugged his iPod directly into the TV sound system.
“Want some jazz?” Sam asked her.
“Not that Kenny G crap⦔
“No, I meant jazz.”
He dialed up the jazz playlist from the menu and started with Cannonball Adderley's recording of “Autumn Leaves,” with Miles Davis on trumpet.
“Now, that's not bad,” Heather said when the music began filling the room.
Sam went to the window and pulled the drapes wide open so they could see the lights of the city through the streaks of raindrops.
“Do you work out?” Heather asked him.
“Not much,” Sam said. He felt a flush of pride that this attractive younger woman seemed to be admiring his form.
“You should.”
I walked into that one, Sam told himself.
When the waiter arrived with their scrod and their wine, they set their plates on the marble table in front of the fireplace and talked as they ate. She asked Sam how long he'd been a Minneapolis cop, and he told her about himself: about his father being a cop, about going to the police academy after college, about becoming a homicide detective, about being shot in the knee and taking almost two years off to rehabâmostly on golf courses.
“So why didn't you go back to the force?”
“It's in my blood, but not in my makeup. I need to call my own shots.”
He changed the subject and asked Heather about herself. She was from Connecticut, and had grown up in a household with divided loyalties, including baseball. Her father was a Red Sox die-hard and a Yaz fan, while her mother loved Mickey Mantle and the Yankees. They'd divorced for other reasons, but Heather always thought the Yankees-Red Sox split played at least a small part. While the marriage was coming apart, Heather was attending a prep school in Massachusetts, and then Harvard. She came to side with her father after her first few games at Fenway.
“I learned to hate the Yankees,” she said. “Paul O'Neill, Don Mattingly, Tino Martinezâand I really hated Wade Boggs when he went over to the dark side. And A-RodâI bought one of those T-shirts from a street vendor, the one that said A-ROD DRINKS WINE COOLERS.”
“How about Derek Jeter?”
“He's not so bad. I'm not blind.”
She'd graduated with honors and then enrolled in Harvard Business School. The next summer she applied for an internship with the Red Sox, and got the position after a personal interview with Louis Kenwood himself. He asked her to apply for a fulltime job with his company when she graduated. She did, and within three years she'd become his executive assistant.
Sam's expression must have implied his suspicions.
“Lou's devoted to his wife,” Heather said. “She has emphysema. Probably won't live to see spring training. I feel sorry for him. First his wife, and now this.”
“Looks like he's dealing with his troubles pretty well.”
“He's an amazing manâa very vital guy.”
Sam still looked at Heather with skepticism. She wiped the corners of her mouth with her white cloth napkin and placed it on the table.
“I need more than a seventy-eight-year-old manâno matter how vital he is.”
She stood up and began unbuttoning her silk blouse from the top. Sam had sensed a change in Heather's attitude toward him, sometime between the end of the DVD and the beginning of the Woodford, but he wasn't expecting this. He quickly thought of Caroline as Heather got to the fourth button and drew open her blouse, revealing a not very business-like black bra that barely covered the bottom halves of her breasts. Caroline had not committed to him yet; he was technically a free agent. It still felt wrong, but that was part of what made it so irresistible.
Heather walked around to Sam's side of the table, and the room suddenly got a lot warmer. Sam glanced at the glowing logs in the fireplace; no, that wasn't it.
“If this is some kind of test to see if I can keep my mind on the job⦔ Sam said.
“It isn't.”
She sat on his lap and moved her lips close to his. He reached up and put his left hand in her hair, running his fingers through the soft, smooth cascade and gently drawing her face the rest of the way to his. They kissed, Sam with a hunger for this beautiful woman he'd been looking at all evening, and Heather with the undisguised lust of someone who had not been sexually satisfied recently.
Sam helped Heather pull off her shirt as they continued to kiss, and he drew the cups of her bra downward, allowing her warm, round breasts to emerge. He ran the backs of his fingers gently upward against her nipples, and she shuddered. She began unbuttoning his shirt, and when she was finished he picked her up and carried her into the bedroom. They undressed quickly, and Sam pulled the duvet onto the floor. They could hear popping noises from the fire in the living room, and the rain began to drum harder on the window as Sam drew a sheet up to their waists.
“Are you using something?” Sam asked her. “I didn't pack anything. Didn't think I'd need⦔
Heather rolled on top of Sam, sat up straddling his midsection, and ran her hands over his chest, her breasts slightly swaying.
“Don't worry,” she said. “I'm on top of it.”
Heather slid out of bed before eight the next morning and called Kenwood's office on her phone. She said she was having a meeting with Sam and would be in by noon. As she dressed, she seemed to slip back into the formality she'd displayed when Sam first met her. There was no morning-after playfulness, no touching, kissing, or implying that anything significant had happened between them. Sam was fine with that. He'd enjoyed her, but it was Caroline he thought of when he woke up and looked at Heather lying next to him. Was there something wrong with a night of delicious, meaningless sex between two consenting, unmarried, uncommitted adults? It bothered him that he was having a hard time answering his own question.
Heather left the room to go to a nearby bank and draw $10,000 from one of Kenwood's accounts, telling Sam she'd meet him in the lobby cafe for breakfast at nine. He was waiting for her at a table when she walked in, still wearing the blazer from the day before, and carrying her leather bag snugly under her arm.
“It's an odd sensation, walking down Boylston Street with $10,000 in cash.” Heather took her seat opposite Sam. “It feels dangerous. I think I like it.”
“Will Kenwood have a problem with you withdrawing that much money?”
“No. It's just business.”
“Do you think he'd have a problem with you sleeping with me?”
“I don't know. And I don't really care. It's my business what I do when I'm out of the office.”
“So that was a typical night for you?”
“No.”
“You just couldn't resist me.”
“I'm busy all the time. I don't meet a lot of guys, believe it or not. Once I found out we were going to be working together, I figured it would happen eventually. I just decided, why wait?”
“How did Lou meet his wife?”
The question caught Heather by surprise, and she momentarily dropped her eyes, as though she'd misplaced something.
“She was his secretary,” Heather said. “Back in the '60s. He divorced his first wife and married Katherine. I've seen pictures of her back then. I've got to admit, she was hot.”
“The pattern continues.”
“What the hell do you mean by that?”
“You're hot, too.”
“I'm not Lou's secretary.”
Heather ripped open a packet of Sweet 'n' Low and poured a fourth of it into her coffee.
“I knew the minute you looked at me yesterday that you thought I was a bimbo,” she said. “I get that all the time.”
“So, if you think a guy doesn't respect you, you go to bed with him?”
“Don't you respect me?”
“I still don't know you all that well⦔
“What else do you want to know?” she asked. She took a sip of her coffee.
“What do you like?”
“Fast cars. Riding westernâyou were wrong yesterday about English-style. Champagne. Escargots. New Zealand. The Wall Street Journal. What about you? What do you like?”
“Four-part harmony. A triple into the gap. A flush two-iron. Single-malt Scotch with a Bass Ale chaser.”
“That sounded rehearsed.”
“But true.”
They ate in silence for a while. Sam could tell Heather was intelligent and well-educated, but she had a chip on her shoulder, too. Beauty was an asset she was willing to use, but unwilling to be defined by. Fair enough; it was time to find out whether she could be of any use to him.
“Does Kenwood have any other heirs besides Katherine?”
“He had a son from his first marriage, but he died a couple of years ago. A drowning accident somewhere on the West Coast.”
“Was he in Lou's will?”
“I don't know. Lou never talked about him.”
“Was he married?”
“If he was, Lou never heard from the wife.”
“You will, when Katherine dies.”
“That's Lou's problem, not mine.”
“When Lou dies, who gets the team?”
“If he doesn't remarry, it will probably be put into some kind of trust, same as when Jean Yawkey died. Then it will be sold. That's how Lou got it.”
They paid the bill at 10:30; Sam had to meet Sal Bucca at eleven. He told Heather he wanted to go alone.
“Lou says I go where you go,” she said. “Besides, I'm not sure I trust you with all that cash.”
“Hell of a thing to say to the man who took your virginity last night.”
Heather smirked, then shouldered the leather bag, noticeably heavier with the cash inside.
“Won't Bucca know who you are?” Sam asked.
“I'm never in the papers. The reporters all want to talk to Lou, the club president, or the G.M.”
They walked out the lobby doors onto Arlington Street. The previous night's rain had moved through, leaving the sidewalks cleaner and the air fresher. Tourists and office workers taking early lunches sat around the fountain in the Public Garden across the street, enjoying the crisp fall morning. Sam and Heather crossed Arlington at Beacon Street and walked east toward Charles. Sam wasn't anticipating any trouble from Sal Bucca, but he was wearing his gun under his jacket, just to be the well-equipped private eye.
They crossed Charles Street and walked along the north boundary of the Boston Common, which was also bordered by Beacon, Park, Tremont, and Boylston, and abutted Boston's financial and government districts. They turned right at Park, where the 200-year-old steeple of the Park Street Church was being refurbished against the backdrop of modern skyscrapers. In the Granary burying ground next to the church, the headstones of Sam Adams, John Hancock, and Paul Revere poked up from the hallowed soil, a daily tourist attraction for visitors following the Freedom Trail.
There was a noticeable difference in appearance between the Public Garden and the Common; the lawn and flowers of the Public Garden were meticulously maintained by workers who speared stray paper and cigarette butts with spiked sticks and put the refuse into the trash bags slung over their shoulders. The Common was a different story. The grass was patchier, pigeons and squirrels fought over food refuse left behind by office workers around the two-level Brewer's fountain, and bums slept in the sunlight on the sloped hillside that led up to the Statehouse.
Sam stood by the fountain near the corner of Park and Tremont and looked around for the fat man in the Sox cap with the cigar, but saw no one fitting that description. He checked the time read-out on his phone: eleven on the dot.
He felt a tap on his arm.
“You Skarda?”
He turned to see a bareheaded, balding man with a crooked nose and a perfectly even set of false upper teeth standing next to him. The voice sounded like the first guy Sam had talked to when he called Bucca's number the night before. The face looked like that of a hockey player, or a boxer. Whatever he'd been, they'd had to stitch him back together a bunch of times.
“Yeah, I'm Skarda. Who are you?”
“I work for Sal. Follow me.”
He began walking westward into the Common, and Sam and Heather followed. False Teeth turned and said, “She stays here.”
“No, she doesn't,” Sam said. “It's her ten thousand.”
“Suit yourself.”
They walked past the fountain and up the hill to a grassy spot shaded by two towering maple trees. A short, dumpy man with a two-day beard, wearing a Red Sox cap, was sitting on a bench under one of the trees.
“Where's the cigar?” Sam asked him.
“I'm tryin' to quit,” said the man Sam assumed was Sal Bucca. “Who's the puss?”
“My banker.”
Bucca turned to False Teeth. “Ya frisk 'em?”
“Not yet.”
“I'm carrying a gun, Sal,” Sam said. He opened his jacket to show the holstered Glock. “She's not.”
“I don't give a shit about no gun,” Bucca said. “I gotta check ya for wires.”
False Teeth moved quickly to Sam, untucked his shirt, ran his hand up Sam's chest and back, then patted him down below the waist. Then he walked over to Heather, who took a half step backward as he approached.
“No, you don't,” Sam said. He put a hand on False Teeth's shoulder. The goon slapped it away and reached for Heather's blouse.
Sam put his leg behind False Teeth's legs, reached across his chest to his opposite shoulder and pulled him backwards. False Teeth fell hard on his back, but reached into his jacket with his right hand as he went down. Sam was on him before he could pull his hand out, yanking his arm up behind his back. Sam reached into False Teeth's jacket, pulled out the gun, and threw it on the grass, then pushed False Teeth forward until his face was mashed sideways into the ground.
“If you don't want to spring for another set of uppers, keep your hands off her,” Sam said. He tightened the painful angle of False Teeth's arm behind his back. “We're not cops. We're not working for the cops.”
“Let him go, Sam,” Heather said.
He looked up at her and saw that she had taken off her blazer and was unbuttoning her blouse. She pulled it open and showed Bucca her black bra, then turned around and lifted her blouse to show there was no wire on her back. Then she turned back to Bucca and hiked up her skirt to her panties, turned around once and dropped the skirt again.
“Satisfied?” she asked Bucca.
“You bet,” he said.
Fifty feet away, a group of grade school kids was being led through the Common. Their teacher was busy explaining that the Common was the oldest municipal park in America, originally used for grazing animals and public hangings, while several of the boys in the group stared slack-jawed at Heather buttoning her shirt.
Sam and Heather sat down with Bucca on the bench, while False Teeth stood a few yards away, grimacing and flexing his shoulder.
“Sorry about my associate, there, but a guy like me can't be too careful,” Sal said. “I got into this business right after that B.C. point-shaving shit back in '79. Then the Feds leaned on us bookies to try to bring down the Boston mob. I told 'em I don't know nothing about that. I ain't goin' to Walpole.”
Heather took the cash out of her leather bag and handed the money to Bucca. He flipped through it with his thumb, and appeared satisfied.
“Now, whadya wanna know?” Bucca said.
Sam asked him about the betting lines on the Patriots Super Bowls, the most recent playoff series for the Celtics and Bruins, the recent NCAA basketball tournament games for Boston College and UConn, and all the Red Sox post-season series since 2002. Bucca provided detailed information on how the lines had shiftedâor notâfor each of those events. Nothing stood out, including the World Series. The Sox had been big favorites over the Rockies; no surprise there. They'd been slight favorites over the Cardinals, and as Jimmy had said, that line had barely moved.
“I ain't stupid,” Bucca finally said. “I know what you're lookin' for.”
Sam and Heather looked quickly at each other. Could he?
“Nobody can fix a game nowadays,” Sal said. “Too many people know too much. You could still get a college kid to shave points, but who ya gonna bribe in the pros? The stars make too much money, and the scrubs don't have no impact on the game.”
“What about that NBA ref?” Sam said. “He admitted getting involved with gamblers. He said some players might have shaved points.”
“Look, that guy was a gambling addict, and everybody knows NBA players are knuckleheads. Amateurs coulda done that deal.”
“So it could happen,” Sam said. “If somebody had inside dope on a big game, and wanted to use the information, who would know about it?”
“The Vegas boys would know,” Bucca said. “Manny DiMeola at the Stardust, or Jim Leone, the guy who sets the lines for LVSC.”
“What's that?”
“Las Vegas Sports Consultants. They give the lines to most of the Vegas sports books.”
Bucca explained to Sam that the Vegas bookmakers wouldn't dare try to do anything funny with the odds, or manipulate a game. They were already making plenty of money. Honest games kept them in businessâa damn good business.
“You'd have to be looking at a gambler, maybe a guy who's connected. Like that bozo Rothstein, the guy who fixed the 1919 Series. I mean, there's guys like him in every city right now, high rollers and mob guys who know lots of jocks. Maybe one of them thinks they could get to somebody.”
“Anybody like that here in Boston?”
“Aw, the only guy here who could have pulled off something like that was Donnie Sullivan. He had the operation in South Boston, but he ain't around anymore.”
South BostonâPaul O'Brien was from South Boston. Probably a coincidence, Sam figured, but something to file away for later.
“What happened to him?” Sam asked.
“Disappeared. On the lam from the Feds. Or maybe he's in the witness protection program. Or dead. I dunno.”
“How about Chicago?”
“Tony âThe Pony' Peloso would be the guy. He runs the Chicago Outfit. But he's tryin' to beat a federal murder rap. Besides, I never heard nothin' about him and a sports fix.”
“St. Louis?”
“Lemme thinkâ¦that group is pretty much busted up.”
“L.A.?”
“Who knows? Not much goin' on out there. Sid Mink, maybeâbut the L.A. boys ain't what you'd call a powerhouse outfit.”
“Anybody else?”
“Like I say, they're all over. And it don't have to be a local guy. Rothstein was from New York, and he fixed a Series between Chicago and Cincy. But it just don't happen these days. Believe me. That it? Cuz I got business to attend to.”
“That's it.”
“Thanks for the dough,” Bucca said. He stood up, and False Teeth fell in beside him as he began walking back toward Park Street. Then Bucca looked back at Heather and said, “And thanks for the show, sweetie.”
He blew her a kiss.
Sam glanced at Heather to see if Bucca's last remark embarrassed her, but she appeared to give it no thought. Instead, she was smoothing out her skirt and blazer.