“Nice to see you again,” he said.
“Always seems too long,” I said. “Doesn’t it.”
“Yeah. What have you got?”
“You’re ahead of me,” I said. “Lemme get a drink.”
He nodded. I ordered. The bartender brought it. It was a quiet afternoon at Locke’s bar. Later, people would come in and have a cocktail while waiting to be seated, but at 5:10 in the afternoon there was only one guy, reading the Wall Street Jour- nal and nursing a Gibson.
“You got anything?” I said.
“We’ve gotten a look at Alderson’s finances,” Epstein said.
“He’s got about a hundred and forty thousand in a money market. No checking account. No savings.”
“Better than I’m doing,” I said.
“True,” Epstein said.
He poked the pickled onion around in the bottom of his glass.
“Odd that there’s no checking account,” I said.
“True,” Epstein said.
He got the onion just where he wanted it in his glass and sipped a little of the drink.
“The bothersome thing,” he said, “is that the only activity in the account is at the end of each month, when his paycheck from Concord gets automatically deposited.”
“How long?”
“Account was opened with a thousand dollars two years ago,”
Epstein said. “He has not withdrawn anything, which is why it’s up to a hundred and forty thousand.”
“So what’s he live on?”
Epstein shook his head.
“Speaker’s fees?” I said.
“Most of those gigs are free,” Epstein said. “Very few pay much.”
“And he’s got an expensive condo, and a nice car, and he employs a driver.”
“So where’s it come from?” Epstein said.
“Is that a rhetorical question?”
“Sadly, so far,” Epstein said, “no.”
“I have a theory,” I said. “But first let me give you what I know.”
“I like a case when people start saying know instead of think, ”
Epstein said.
He gestured for another drink. The bartender brought it and looked at me. I shook my head. I didn’t mind getting drunk with Susan, but I didn’t want to show up that way. Epstein poured his still uneaten onion into the new drink and the bartender took away the empty glass.
“His name isn’t, or wasn’t, Perry Alderson,” I said. “It was Bradley Turner.”
“That his original name?” Epstein said.
“Don’t know,” I said. “Probably.”
“Probably is better than maybe, ” Epstein said. “Where’d he get the name, obit notice?”
“Better than that,” I said. “He killed the original Perry Alderson.”
Epstein drank some of his Gibson.
“Just to steal the name?” he said.
“No, it was involved with killing his own wife, the late Anne Marie Turner.”
“You prove any of this?” Epstein said.
“You will,” I said. “I’ll give you enough stuff to investigate. It’ll be only a matter of time.”
Epstein turned in his stool so that his back was against the bar. He held his Gibson in both hands in front of him.
“Go,” he said.
I gave him everything I had, except the part about Alderson having mental sex with Susan. It took a while, and Epstein didn’t interrupt me once. He sipped his drink carefully. Otherwise he just sat and listened and didn’t move. As I talked, the bar began to fill. Men in suits, mostly. A lot of them pols down from the state house, just across the Common. When I fi nished, Epstein took a last drink from his Gibson, and held it in his mouth for a moment before swallowing. Then he tipped the glass up and his head back, and got the two onions, which he chewed and swallowed.
“So he’s old enough in fact,” Epstein said when the onions were gone, “to have been in all that counterculture boogaloo that he claims.”
“Probably,” I said.
“It’s an area the bureau covered exhaustively,” Epstein said.
“Because they were such a threat to national security,”
I said.
“You know it,” Epstein said. “They were giving aid and comfort, for God’s sake, to our enemies.”
“Who were?”
Epstein grinned.
“I forget,” he said.
“I think it was the commies,” I said.
“Oh, yeah,” Epstein said. “Them.”
“Eternal vigilance,” I said.
“Sure,” Epstein said. “Anyway, if he ain’t in our files, he didn’t exist in the sixties. Can you write down names and places and dates?”
“Everybody but one,” I said. “I implied to the PI that I wouldn’t give him to you.”
“Professional courtesy?” Epstein said.
“Actually I threatened him with you if he wouldn’t talk to me.”
Epstein nodded.
“Do I need him?” Epstein said.
“I don’t think you will,” I said. “He’s solid enough. But if you do need him to make your case, I’ll give him to you.”
Epstein nodded.
“Your word’s good,” he said.
“Mostly,” I said.
Epstein smiled slightly.
“I think you should put a tail on Alderson,” I said. “Open or not, that’s up to you. But this thing is going to blossom pretty soon, I think, and we wouldn’t want Alderson to disappear again.”
Epstein nodded.
“You got plans you’re not sharing with me?” he said.
“I do,” I said.
Epstein thought about that for a moment and then shrugged.
“So far so good,” he said.
64.
On tuesday morning at 9:50 Alderson came strolling into Susan’s office and found me there, with my arms crossed, leaning my hips against the front of Susan’s desk.
“What are you doing?” he said.
I didn’t say anything.
“Where’s Susan? Dr. Silverman.”
I didn’t answer.
“I have an appointment,” he said.
I said nothing.
“All right. I don’t know what game you are playing but I haven’t the time nor the patience.”
He started to turn.
“Wait a minute,” I said and stood up.
He turned back toward me and I hit him with a left hook. It was the left hook I’d been working on with Hawk for years. The left hook that if I’d had it as a kid Joe Walcott would never have beaten me. The left hook I’d been saving for a special occasion. It was a lollapalooza. I felt all of me go into the hook. I felt it up my arm and into my chest and shoulder and back. I felt it in my soul. It was almost like ejaculation.
Alderson staggered back against the wall to the right of the door and sank to a sitting position. He wasn’t out, but bells were ringing. His eyes were unfocused. He felt sort of feebly around on the floor as if he were trying to locate where he was. I went back to the desk and leaned my hips on it again and folded my arms, and waited. Slowly his eyes refocused. He stared at me. And in his stare I saw for the first time the furtive reptilian glitter of his soul.
“You used to be Bradley Turner,” I said. “You killed your wife and a charter boat captain named Perry Alderson and stole his identity. You are employed by an outfit called FFL to acquire information.”
The reptilian gaze didn’t waver.
“So the price of silence has now gone up,” I said. He didn’t say anything.
“I want one million dollars by tomorrow, in cash, or all of this goes to the FBI.”
He kept looking at me as he slowly got his feet under him and slid upright against the wall.
“We had a standoff,” I said. “What I had would cause suspicion but you could have survived it. Now you can’t. If the Feds don’t bust you fi rst, the FFL will kill you to cover its tracks.”