Danny nodded.
“Poor Abby, huh?”
“It’s been a rough couple of years,” he said sadly.
“Rough for you, too, I bet.”
Danny looked at him. “Yeah.”
There was a long pause, and then the moment seemed to have passed. Galvin looked at his laptop screen. Danny wasn’t sure whether Galvin had gone back to whatever he was working on, or had just fallen silent, not wanting to dig further.
Then Galvin said crisply, “Could I ask you something?”
Danny looked at him, glimpsed the grave expression, felt his stomach tighten. “Okay…”
Galvin looked over at the women, who were still deep in conversation. Then back at Danny.
“My security people found something on my BlackBerry.” His gray eyes locked into Danny’s.
“Security people?” Danny felt his face grow hot. He wondered whether his face was flushing visibly. He hoped not.
Abby and Jenna laughed again, and Celina got up from her seat and went to where the girls were watching a movie.
“My clients-I told you, they’re an extremely wealthy family, right? Well, they’re really private. I mean, almost paranoid. Part of my deal with them is, I agree to regular security audits and intrusion detection systems and communications security, all that. I mean, real crazy, over-the-top stuff.”
“Okay…?” Danny shrugged, palms up, with a mystified what-does-this-have-to-do-with-me? look.
“They found an attempt to access my BlackBerry.”
Galvin paused. Danny wasn’t sure if Galvin was waiting for a response. So he said, “Huh.” His throat had dried up. He swallowed a few times. “Weird.”
“So I need to ask you something.”
Danny cleared his throat, swallowed. “Sure.”
“I never put the thing down. Celina calls it my electronic pacifier. I always have it with me. In bed, in the crapper, everywhere. And I’m trying to remember when the last time was it wasn’t in my hands. And it comes to me.” He paused. “It was when we played squash a couple of days ago.”
“At the Plympton Club?”
Galvin nodded.
“I don’t remember,” Danny said smoothly. “You sure you didn’t take it with you onto the court?”
He shook his head slowly, deliberately. “They don’t allow you to bring cell phones into the squash courts.”
Danny shrugged. He felt a rising tide of panic. His mouth was so dry now, he could barely swallow. His heart was pounding. He tried to look unfazed, or maybe even bored, but he knew it wasn’t working.
“And then-I know this’ll sound nutty to you-but when I got back to my locker after the game? The phone was in the wrong pocket.”
Danny laughed, once, a dry, brittle laugh.
“I know, I know-like, how OCD is that, right? But it’s just a habit. I’m right-handed, so I keep my BlackBerry in my left inside pocket.” He touched the left side of his chest, right over the left breast pocket of his suit jacket. “You know, like how Buffalo Bill always kept his gun holster on his left side or whatever. So I can draw fast.”
Galvin smiled casually but watched Danny’s eyes.
Damn it to hell, Danny thought. Just come out with it. Stop toying with me. Accuse me; get it out there so I can bat it away with a casual denial.
Don’t act defensive. Don’t act angry. Act, if anything, bored.
An innocent person won’t take a wild accusation like that seriously.
Danny broke the silence. “You think maybe one of the snotty club members is engaged in corporate espionage? Like maybe the Exeter T-shirt guy?”
Galvin was no longer smiling. “The security people say the time when someone tried to access my BlackBerry-well, it was when you and I were playing squash.”
“Bizarre.” Danny was starting to feel queasy.
“So help me out here,” Galvin said. He was no longer looking directly at Danny. He was staring past Danny’s right shoulder at the window.
“Okay.”
“You went to the locker room when I was on the court.”
“I did?”
“You went to get some water. Some bottles of water.”
“I vaguely remember.”
I pretended to take his locker key “accidentally.” He barely seemed to notice at the time.
“Remember that kid, the Hispanic kid, José? In the locker room?”
“The one you were speaking Spanish to?”
“Yep. Him. You didn’t see him near my locker, did you?”
Danny blinked a few times. He couldn’t decide whether to continue acting bored or look like he was trying hard to remember something so minor, so obscure, that no one could possibly be expected to recall.
He opted for the eye squint, the furrowed brow. The trying-as-hard-as-I-can-to-remember look.
Trying not to show the relief that washed over him.
And now what? Accuse the locker room attendant of loitering near Galvin’s locker, of breaking into Galvin’s locker? That innocent kid? So he’d end up like Esteban, the chauffeur, sliced and diced in a Dumpster somewhere? Anyway, what would a locker room attendant want with Tom Galvin’s BlackBerry? That made no sense.
Or did it? What if José made a regular habit of ransacking members’ lockers, stealing pocket change here and there, and for some reason-not beyond belief, not at all-he picked up Galvin’s BlackBerry to make a call, or just to look at it? Out of good old-fashioned curiosity?
That was a plausible explanation. But Danny knew that if he pushed that lie, and the cartel believed that some kid from the Plympton Club locker room had tried to get into Tom Galvin’s BlackBerry…
Would the kid really end up carved into a dozen pieces?
Galvin fidgeted. He drew a long breath.
Then something occurred to Danny. “The locker room attendants have access to all the locker keys, I bet.”
“Huh.” Galvin looked dubious.
“Then again… I don’t know, he seemed like a real nice kid.”
“You never know. You think you know someone…”
“Well, who else would have access to your locker?”
“I don’t know what to believe. You wanna know the truth, I don’t care. But my clients-man, do they ever care.”
He looked like he was about to go on when Celina appeared behind him. “Tom, do you know the girls were watching Knocked Up? I told Jenna that’s not for kids. I told her, no more movies or TV for her for the rest of the day.”
Galvin shrugged. “Ah, Celina, she’s got a guest this weekend. Let’s give her a break.”
“No,” Celina said severely. “She has to learn, she breaks the rules, there are consequences.”
A few hours later they landed at Aspen/Pitkin Airport, where they were picked up by a driver, a different one, in a black Chevy Suburban.
This one was armored, too.
40
If he hadn’t known it was a private house, Danny would have assumed they were pulling up in front of a deluxe ski resort. It was an immense, rambling contemporary structure with a Japanese feel to it, built of stone and logs, a short drive north of town in a part of Aspen called Red Mountain. The curves and peaks of the roof were dusted with drifts of snow like powdered sugar.
The floors inside were blond wood, the walls rough-hewn stone and glass. Mostly glass. There were cathedral ceilings, a huge stone fireplace, and floor-to-ceiling picture windows that looked out onto the steeply canted mountainside: an astonishing view.
The driver-a sour-looking, barrel-chested man of around forty-carried everyone’s bags inside. He wore a necklace of colorful wooden beads and seemed to speak no English and talked only with Celina, in Spanish.