The House of Wolves (House of Wolves #1)(53)

The waiter appeared with Gallo’s food now, a huge fillet with mashed potatoes and green beans. He set it down in front of Gallo. Gallo cut off a small piece of steak, washed it down with wine, then made a kissing motion with his fingers before the waiter once again left.

He’s not just playing the part of an old boss, Jack thought. He is an old boss.

Capable of anything.

Including murder.

“What do we do now?” Jack said.

“We proceed as if nothing has changed,” Gallo said, and smiled again.

Jack stood. He knew he had been dismissed without Gallo saying he had.

“You know, Jack,” Gallo said, “we have discovered recently what a random place the world can be. Imagine what an unspeakable tragedy it would be for your beautiful mother if something else happened to one of her other children with all of us this close to getting what we want.”

Another small shrug.

“Or even if something happened to her,” Gallo said.

“Even you’re not capable of that,” Jack said.

“Perhaps so,” Gallo said. “But that doesn’t mean I don’t have associates who are.”

Now he stood, and it was as if his voice rose up along with him, filling the small room, as he pointed a finger at Jack.

“Now find a way to finish your sister once and for all.”





Sixty



AFTER THE HUNTERS POINT game against St. Francis, Ryan Morrissey had walked me to my car—and then asked me to dinner. It was the first time he’d asked since I’d given him the job.

I’d thanked him but told him no, that I’d already made other plans.

“Am I allowed to ask with whom?” he’d said.

“As a matter of fact, you’re not.”

“He actually asked you that?” Detective Ben Cantor said to me now.

“He did.”

“And here I thought the two of you were practically a couple,” Cantor said.

“Don’t believe everything you read.”

“I still can’t believe you said yes to me when I asked,” Cantor said.

“To tell you the truth, Detective, I can’t believe you did ask.”

He had picked the place, Fogata, a few blocks from his house, in Potrero Hill. It was a bit of a dive, Cantor said, but had great food, and it wasn’t the kind of place where we had to worry about the paparazzi staking us out.

Right before I left my own house, Cantor called and said there was still time for me to change my mind. If I wanted to be alone tonight, he’d totally understand.

I told him I wanted a margarita and wanted it now and don’t try to get out of it.

“Are you still happy with the way I delivered my bombshell at the church about Thomas not killing himself?” I said at our table, in the back.

“You did it like a pro,” Cantor said. “It produced a headline I think helps you for a change.”

“Helps us, you mean.”

“Either way,” Cantor said. “Let people worry about what you might know.”

“What we might know.”

He grinned. “Either way,” he said again, and drank some margarita as I did the same.

“You changed the narrative,” Cantor said, “from why did Thomas do it to who might have done it to him.”

Nothing he found at the suite that night had changed his mind. Cantor told me that he had the ability to lift fingerprints at a crime scene and even have them run through the system. Only there were no fingerprints on the railing from which Thomas would have had to jump. No fingerprints and no prints from the bottom of his shoes, if he’d stood on the railing.

“Unless he really did think he could fly,” Cantor told her again, “someone drugged him and then threw him over the railing. On top of all that, there were no prints on the vodka bottle, which meant that somebody wiped it clean.”

“But you said those were Thomas’s prints on the syringe.”

“Yeah. Like I told you that night, those did belong to your brother. But I am still of the opinion that he was unconscious before he went over the railing. I still believe that they stuck him and poured vodka down his throat.”

I suddenly thought I might need more than one margarita tonight.

“If you’re right…”

“I am right.”

“…somebody did that to the nicest one of all of us.”

“And went to a lot of trouble to make it look like a suicide,” Cantor said. “Maybe they didn’t want it to look like another potential murder in the family this close to your father getting tossed.”

“You’re convinced my father did get tossed?”

“Aren’t you?”

“All over a football team,” I said. “And a failing newspaper. But mostly the football team.”

“Not even three dozen of them in existence,” Cantor said.

“But it’s got to be about more than just the team, for somebody to do this to my brother.”

“Somebody who doesn’t give a rip if there’s a run of Wolfs dying these days.”

He licked some salt around the rim of his glass, tasted it, smacked his lips. Then he was staring at me with those big, deep, dark eyes. I finally took a bit of rice and beans just to have a reason to look away.