“You told Yefim you were close.”
“I woulda told that ice-blood motherfucker anything he needed to hear, long as it got him to leave my kitchen.”
“So you’re not close.”
He shook his head.
I looked at Helene in the rearview. She shook her head.
We sat in silence again for a bit.
“Then what good are you?” I said eventually and started the Jeep. “Get out of my car.”
I was scheduled to have a beer with Mike Colette, my friend who owned the distribution warehouses. He’d hired me to discover which of his employees was embezzling, and I’d found an answer he wasn’t going to like. I thought of canceling the meeting, because I was still a hair shaky from the eight bullets that had been fired in my direction, but we’d agreed to meet in West Roxbury and I was already over on that side of town, so I called his cell and told him I was on my way.
He sat at one of the bar tops by the window at West on Centre and gave me a wave as I came through the door, even though he was the only guy at the tables. He’d been like that since we’d met at UMass, an earnest, solid guy of entrenched decency. I never met a soul who didn’t like him. The logic among our friends was if you didn’t like Mike, it said nothing about him but everything about you.
He was a small guy with close-shorn curly black hair and the kind of handshake that you could feel in every bone of your body. He gave it to me when I reached the table and I was so distracted I hadn’t prepared for it. I damn near ended up on my knees and I was pretty sure carpal tunnel set in immediately.
He pointed at the beer in front of my chair. “Just ordered it for you.”
“Thanks, man.”
“Get you anything? Appetizer or something?”
“Oh, no, I’m fine.”
“Sure? You look a little off, man.”
I took a sip of beer. “I had a run-in with some Russians.”
He drank from his own frosted mug, his eyes wide. “They’re a fucking menace in the trucking business, man. I mean, not all Russians, but Kirill Borzakov’s crew? Whew. Stay away from those guys.”
“Too late.”
“No shit?” He put his beer on the coaster. “You had a run-in with Borzakov’s guys?”
“Yup.”
“Kirill’s not just a thug, man, he’s an out-of-his-fucking-mind thug. You heard he got another DUI?”
“Yeah, last week.”
“Last night .” Mike pushed a folded Herald across the table at me. “And this one beats all.”
I found it on page 6: “ ‘Butcher’ Borzakov’s Bezerko Blowup.” He’d taken his Targa into a Danvers car wash. Halfway through the service, he’d apparently become impatient. This was bad news for the car that sat ahead of his in the wash. Kirill rammed it. The car was propelled out of the wash, but the engine of Borzakov’s Targa seized up. Police found him in the parking lot, covered in suds as he tried to attack one of the Panamanians who worked the gas pumps with a wiper blade he’d snapped off his own car. He was Tasered and taken to the ground by four staties. He posted first-quarter NBA numbers on the Breathalyzer and the staties also found a half-gram of cocaine in his seat console. It took him all the way to dinnertime to make his bail. In the sidebar, they ran the names of the four men whose deaths he was suspected of ordering this past year.
I folded the paper. “So it’s not the fact that he’s a killer that should bother me, it’s that he’s a killer having some kind of psychological meltdown?”
“For starters.” He placed an index finger to his nose. “I hear he’s dipping into his own supply.”
I shrugged. Man, was I sick of this shit.
“Patrick, no offense, but you ever think of doing something else?”
“You’re the second person to ask me that today.”
“Well, I could be in the market for a new manager after this lunch, and you did work in trucking all through college, if I remember.”
I shook it off. “I’m good. Thanks, Mike.”
“Never say never,” he said. “All I’m saying.”
“I appreciate that. Let’s talk about your case.”
He folded his hands together and leaned into the table.
“Who do you think is embezzling from you?”
“My night manager, Skip Feeney.”
“It’s not him.”
His eyebrows went up.
“I thought it was him, too. And I’m not saying he’s a hundred percent trustworthy. My guess is he takes a box off a truck every now and then. If you went to his house you’d probably find stereo equipment that matched missing shipments, that kind of thing. But he’s only able to fuck with the shipping manifests. He’s not able to get to invoices. And, Mike, the invoices are the key. In some cases, you’re being double- and triple-billed for shipments that don’t originate with you and don’t arrive at their destinations because they don’t exist.”
“Okay,” he said slowly.
“Someone ordering five pallets of Flowmaster mufflers. That sound right to you?”
“Yeah, that’s about right. We’ll sell them all by July, but if we waited until April to order them, the price would be another six, seven percent higher. It’s a smart risk, even if it eats a little space.”
“But you’ve only got four pallets in the warehouse. And the invoice reads ‘four.’ But the payment was for five. And I checked-they shipped five.” I pulled a notepad from my laptop bag and flipped it open. “What can you tell me about Michelle McCabe?”
He sat back in his chair, his face drawn.
“She’s my accounts-receivable manager. She’s the wife of a buddy of mine. A good buddy.”
“I’m sorry, man. I am.”
“You’re sure?”
I reached back into the laptop bag, came out with my case file. I slid it across the table to him. “Go through the top twenty invoices. Those are the dirty ones. I attached the invoices the companies received so you can compare.”
“Twenty?”
“Could be more,” I said, “but those are the ones would hold up in any court if she ever sued you. Or if she files a grievance with the Labor Board, throws any sort of wrongful termination shit at you. If you want to have her arrested-”
“Oh, no.”
Of course that would be his reaction.
“I know, I know. But if you did, all the proof you need is right there. At the very least, Mike, you should consider making her pay restitution.”
“How much?”
“This past fiscal year alone? She took you for twenty thousand minimum.”
“Jesus.”
“And that’s just the stuff I found. A true auditor, knowing where to look, who knows what he’d find?”
“This economy, and you’re telling me I got to shitcan my accounts-receivable manager and my floor manager?”
“For different reasons, but yeah.”
“Christ.”
We ordered two more beers. The place began to fill up; the traffic outside thickened on Centre Street. Across the street, people pulled up in front of the Continental Shoppe to pick up their dogs from a day’s grooming. While we sat there, I counted two poodles, one beagle, one collie, and three mutts. I thought of Amanda and her thing for dogs, the only trait I’d heard ascribed to her that sounded soft, humanizing.