Chapter 41
I decided to leave talk of selling the pub until later, when I could get Alex alone. I carried a tray of beers to the band.
“What kept you?” Lourey asked testily.
“Sorry, it’s…” But the pub being sold would be another reason to scrap plans for the band.
“Yeah, something came up, right?” Lourey said. “You’re supposed to be putting in more effort here, remember?”
“Who was that woman you were talking to?” Suzy said. “I’ve definitely seen her before.”
I said, “I need to go get my guitar upstairs, but I’m here, okay? Don’t leave. I’ll be right back.”
As I walked down the hall, I heard footsteps behind me and glanced back. Quin, heading toward the men’s john.
But then he was past that door and spinning me by my elbow into Alex’s office.
“Hey,” was all I managed but I was already doing the calculus women had to do all the time: how firm his hand on my arm, how loud the TVs, the angle on the open doorway for escape.
“I need to talk to you,” he said.
“Get your hand off me,” I said.
Some bit of my panic must have shown on my face. “Oh … wow.” He dropped his hand. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean to—”
“Who are you?”
“I told you. My name is Quin—”
“Who are you to think you get to touch me?” I demanded.
He nodded. “Right, right. I see your point. I’m so— Look, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to scare you—”
“You’re making me mad. And you’re still standing between me and the door.”
“Right, of course. Sorry.” He stepped out of the way.
“Get out,” I said. “You’re not supposed to be back here.”
Back out in the hall, he held his hands up in surrender. “Can we start over?”
I could see Alex from where I stood, but I was still rattled. “You can try. What do you want?”
“I wanted to talk with you about your friend,” he said. “That woman at the bar.”
“She’s no friend of mine.”
“That’s probably for the best. I have a friend who works, ah, high up in a federal organization I’d rather not name—”
“I didn’t ask.”
“—and he says Edith Maxwell is bad news.”
I snatched at the sleeve of Quin’s professor jacket and pulled him back into the office.
“Hey!” he said.
“What kind of bad news?”
He shook himself loose from me. “The kind of bad news where maybe you’re meeting with questionable people, people who might be under surveillance? So suddenly you’re under surveillance? Some of her real estate clients are overpaying for properties. By a lot.”
“Okay?”
“Some of her clients,” he said, “are sinking a lot of money into properties, putting up some condos or doing renovations, say, and then claiming a lot of money for construction costs. And they don’t mind so much if no one moves in. Do you see what I’m saying?”
“I really don’t,” I said.
“Say you made a lot of money making and selling illegal products and you needed to put that dirty money through a big ole washing machine…”
“Laundering— Oh! Money laundering? Oh, no.”
“Right,” he said. “These guys use shell companies to keep their identities out of it, but they work through property agents. Owners get pressured, threatened, properties get bid way up, the deals too good to pass up. After a sale, the buildings might sit empty, serving as banks for bad money, or they’re flattened and rebuilt, sold again, and the dirty money comes out the other side squeaky-clean.
Everyone making the deal, they’re helping out these bad actors. ”
“Bad actors,” I said. “Like their accents are wrong? They muff their lines.”
“Very funny,” Quin said impatiently, leveling me with a serious sort of look. “Criminals, okay?”
“Just lightening the mood while I’m processing the information that, just to be clear, Edith is working for someone like a … a gangster.”
“Exactly like a gangster, yes. Not the ghost of Al Capone, the successor of.”
“It’s not Capone’s—the ghost is … never mind. You think Edith Maxwell is in on this,” I said, “knowingly.”
“She knows,” Quin said. “Her bank accounts know all about it. I mean, my friend thinks so.”
Her house certainly knew about it. That damn peacock feather and all the other finery. Quin watched me work my way through to the problem.
“Hold on. One of her clients,” I said. “One of her clients wants to buy this building from Alex. And you think that would be a … crime boss?”
“I think the odds are good, if the deal is strangely generous,” Quin said. “‘The best deal he’s likely to get.’ He’s getting incentivized to take the deal, right? Maybe penalized for staying? Acts of vandalism? Break-ins…”
We’d been under siege. “I should have known when I saw that rotten feather,” I said.
Quin turned an ear toward me as though he hadn’t quite heard. “Feather?”
But I was beyond that feather now, remembering that I’d met Edith not through Alex and his plans to sell McPhee’s, but through Marisa’s disappearance.
Through Sicily.
“I need to talk to your narc friend,” I said.
“Uh, would we say narc?”
“Oh, is that insulting to his narc culture? Get him to come by. Today, and I’ll stand you both a beer on the house.”
“It would help me get him here,” Quin said, “if I knew what you needed from him.”
“There’s a missing woman, my … a friend’s mother is missing,” I said. “She worked for Edith.”
Marisa had been nervous enough about something to buy a gun. A mobster client—a client roster full of them at the job she’d just started? That would do it.
“Couldn’t her disappearance be tied up in all this?” I asked. “Maybe they grabbed her up? As a witness?”
Quin had a strange look on his face.
“I don’t think they would do that,” he said. He seemed to be choosing his words very precisely. “I would—I would think they’d let her family know she was safe, at least. If they had moved her to a safe location.”
“Or if they’re tailing that crime boss, and he has her,” I said. “Or if he … if he killed her? The feds would know, right?”
Quin nodded into the mid-distance, either working through that scenario or figuring out how to tell me I was full of it.
“Look, I can’t guarantee I can get my friend here today. I think he’s pretty busy working to nail this client of Maxwell’s. Maybe after that, something with your friend’s mom will shake loose.”
“I don’t want her to be shaken loose.” I took a step toward him. I needed him to understand, and I would clutch at his elbow patches again if I had to. “Her daughter wants her home safe and I—I want that, too.”
“Sure,” Quin said. He had tiny freckles on the bridge of his nose.
Have you ever been standing too close to someone and, like, the wind changes somewhere in Tokyo, the butterfly’s wings flap, whatever, and you’re suddenly surprised by how close? How small the room. How broad the shoulders.
Quin had felt the shift, too. A lock of his tidy hair had fallen over his forehead. The moment stretched out, our breath mingled, close, almost as if—
He took a step backward.
“Good note,” Quin said, clearing his throat. “No shaking your friend’s mom.”
I stepped back, too. He wasn’t the only person who could step back. Why was it so hot in here? “No shaking,” I agreed.
“Okay, um…” Quin said. “I’ll give my friend a call.”
“And I’ll call my … my friend, too.” I definitely needed to talk to Sis.