“In all those years, anyone ever come asking for it?” I said.
“No. Not until now.”
“You mean us.”
“Not just you.”
Kimberly and leaned forward and stared at him. “Go ahead, Sully,” she said.
“I got a call, not too long ago. Just a call. A voice I didn’t recognize. It asked about the package I was keeping safe. I said I don’t know what he was talking about. It asked again, told me to think back twenty years. I said I didn’t know what he was talking about. The voice told me to expect a visitor. That’s all I heard, and then you guys showed up.”
I looked at Kimberly, whose wide eyes were now wide with the big questions. Who had known? Who had called?
“The voice,” I asked, all the while watching Kimberly’s expression, “was it British?”
“Yeah,” he said. “It was.”
And Kimberly’s pretty wide eyes widened even farther. “Colfax?” she said.
“Who?” said Jimmy.
“That’s right,” I said.
“How’d he know about it?” she said.
“Who?” said Jimmy.
“What did you do with the other crap in the toolbox?” I said.
“Left it there,” said Jimmy.
“In the box?”
“Yeah.”
“Where is it now?”
“Buried. I moved it to the basement of the place I live at now.”
“Let’s dig it up.”
“No. They might come for it.”
“Tell you what, Sully. I’ll take it off your hands, which will be a relief for you. And I can work it so you never get that visitor you’ve been fearing.”
“You’re full of shit. You can’t do that.”
“I’m a lawyer,” I said. “I can walk through walls.”
“Now I know you’re full of shit.”
“Trust me.”
He laughed a sad, rueful laugh. “Do I got any choice?”
“Let’s go dig it up,” I said.
And we did.
Chapter 56
FLYING HOME TO Philadelphia I was trying to read a play I had picked up in the airport bookstore, a thrilling tale of murder by poison, of ghostly apparitions, of madness and vengeance and the madness of revenge. I figured if Eddie Dean was reading Hamlet, I ought to brush up on it too. The misty night, the father’s ghost, the poetry of death. It was more thrilling then I had remembered it, but even so I found it hard to keep my focus. I was reading Hamlet, yes, but what I was seeing in my mind’s eye was the arrogant visage of Tommy Greeley, the smirk that seemed to say, Aren’t I something? Oh yeah, he was something all right.
Whatever I had thought of Tommy Greeley before my trip to Brockton, however much I might have identified with him in his rebelliousness, his irreverence, his striving to rise above his family’s dysfunction, my opinion had changed completely after hearing Jimmy Sullivan recite the sad story of his withered life, and the friend, who was no friend, who had done so much to destroy its promise. Some of what Tommy had done to him was done out of malevolence, I could feel that, maybe an unconscious jealousy of a friend who had already achieved success, but there was something else at work too, something almost worse. Carelessness. A carelessness, I supposed, that defined everything about Tommy Greeley’s life. He had been careless about one friend’s basketball career, careless about another friend’s marriage, careless about all the lives he was destroying with his drugs as he built his fortune. Just utter carelessness with other human beings. And when his carelessness had put him in danger, he had found the most careless way out.
Kimberly Blue was seated next to me in the plane, absorbed in her own reading. We were on the early-morning flight. I was anxious to get back to the office, to do some work and send a query off to California before I visited my father that night. She had to hurry back and see a man about a boat.
“A boat?”
“Something for the boss. External relations. Just a party thing, he said.”
“But he’s out of money.”
“There’s always money for a boat, V.”
So there we were, on the early flight home, our carry-ons stashed in the overhead compartment, along with the tool locker dug up from Jimmy Sullivan’s basement the night before. I watched Kimberly concentrate on the volume on her lap and as I did there was something about her that reminded me of the photographs. The line of her neck as she bent toward the book, the shape of her hand, the wisp of hair that covered her ear. I knew it was a trick, a transference from one woman to another, and I knew why it was happening. But still, it had its effect, the similarities, and I felt a wave of emotion toward her, a strangely paternal emotion.
“How’s the reading material?” I said.
Before she raised her head, she carefully put her finger on the page of the notebook on her lap, a notebook full of diary entries twenty years old that we had found in the locker.
“Gad, V. She can’t even blow her nose without writing all about it. And she goes on and on about the sex, like no one’s ever hooked up before. Talk about a slut. I’ve gotten to the part about the veil we found.”
“Interesting?”
“Yuck.”
“All right, I don’t want to know.”
“But between all the sex stuff, you can tell she really was struggling. Caught between two men, a husband she loves and a man with whom she is sexually obsessed. She hasn’t decided yet what to do. It’s like she has to work it out on the page first. Are you going to read it?”
“Absolutely not. I’ve had enough experience with her writing to last me.”
“But see, V, I was right about her all along, wasn’t I?”
Yes, the notebooks for which Alura Straczynski had been desperately searching, the missing pieces of her solipsistic opus, were in the locker, along with all kinds of other stuff of varying levels of interest for me – a college yearbook, a fencing trophy, a Leica camera, snapshots of friends, a financial ledger, the yucky silk veil, a book of selected poems by Lord Byron, and a how-to book, a cheap-looking paperback from a publishing company called Loompanics Unlimited.
I had taken a special interest in the snapshots. Barbecues, parties, days at the beach, a lot of good-looking young folk having a rich old time. Most of the people in the pictures I had never seen before, but I did recognize a few, absolutely. Lonnie, poor dead Lonnie, here much younger but still with the beard and the motorcycle style, gazing at Chelsea, lovely Chelsea, with her arm around a man I recognized from the photo Mrs. Greeley had given me. Was that the triangle that took Tommy down? Or was it the other triangle, the one Kimberly was reading about in the notebooks? There was also a picture of Sylvia Steinberg, young, thin, absolutely stunning, her gaze cast not at the camera or her boyfriend but at Chelsea. There was a stiff shot of Jackson Straczynski, posed and serious in a suit, his hair long, his tie thick. There was a strange man, short, dark, husky, whose image was ubiquitous in the photographs. His dark eyes burned at the camera even as his mouth attempted a smile. The other partner, Cooper Prod, I assumed. And in almost every shot, of course, there was Tommy Greeley himself, standing tall, smiling slyly, the life of the party. But the party was running out of time.
The objects in the tool locker spelled out with utter clarity the last desperate days of Tommy Greeley. His drug empire was collapsing, the dogged Telushkin was doggedly pursuing him, indictments were as certain as the sunrise. Tommy Greeley, in the midst of a torrid affair with his best friend’s wife, had decided on a drastic course of action. That Loompanics book we found was entitled How to Disappear and Never Be Found, and for Tommy it had provided a blueprint. He would run away, run away with her, take what money he could and start a new life as someone else, still rich, but now out from under the shadow of his criminal past. He was always one for slipping out of trouble, had said his father. Chapter Four of How to Disappear and Never Be Found: “Creating a New Identity.”