The House of Wolves (House of Wolves #1)(57)

By now they were talking on the phone most nights. Even though the closest they’d come to being a real couple was when they’d kissed in front of his house the night they’d had dinner at Fogata, before she got into her car and drove off.

“I didn’t believe this was going to happen until it was actually happening,” Jenny said.

“Now the Wolfs have really turned into a royal family,” Cantor said.

“Except ours is even more messed up than theirs is,” she said, and told him she would call when the interview was, mercifully, over.

He went back to his notes then, and his notebooks, spread out in front of him on the kitchen table. Two murders. Father and son. Looking for common denominators other than the two of them being related. One man, he was certain, had been thrown over the side of a boat. The other man, Cantor was even more certain, had been thrown out the open window of a suite, his own, at Wolves Stadium as part of a staged event.

Ben Cantor did not believe in coincidence. No good detective did. Two members of the family, what he’d just called the royal family of football in San Francisco, dying like this, this close together—well, what were the odds of that, Detective Cantor?

He’d told Jenny he’d find out what happened to her brother. But Cantor never lost sight of the fact that he’d come into this because of her father, who, he knew, had plenty of enemies. All guys like Joe Wolf made enemies. Cantor was still trying to figure out if the most dangerous enemies of all were in Wolf’s own family.

He opened the notebook closest to him. Found his notes on a conversation—a bombshell one at that—he’d had just that afternoon with a guy named Patrick Tate, one of Thomas Wolf’s childhood friends, who’d been with him in the suite the night Thomas died. An old drinking and drugging buddy who told Cantor that he was another one who’d finally taken what he called “the cure.”

Tate had talked about how geeked up Thomas had been that night, more antic than he’d been since rehab, but Tate had just written it off to the Wolves coming back and winning the game the way they had.

Before they’d finished the interview, Tate had said he wanted to ask Cantor a question.

“You find out who offed Joe yet?”

Cantor told him he was still working on it.

“Thomas hated him so much,” Tate said. “You know that, right? It doesn’t make any difference to either one of them now, obviously, but he told me one time, back when we were in high school, that he fantasized about throwing his father off the Golden Gate Bridge.”

“The father must have treated him pretty badly,” Cantor said.

“The way he treated everybody, far as I could ever tell,” Tate said. “I figured Thomas just let all that anger go finally. Part of his getting the cure. The ‘let go and let God’ thing from the program. But he always used to say that he wished the world knew what a criminal his father was.”

“Kindly old Joe Wolf?” Cantor said.

“Thomas even told me one night when we were partying pretty hard that he thought his father was the one capable of murder if it meant finally getting full control of the team,” Tate said. “You know, getting the other half from the original Tommy Wolf. Thomas’s uncle.”

“He died in a car accident,” Cantor said.

“Thomas never mentioned it again,” Tate said. “Hey, it was probably the vodka talking that night. But he sure didn’t seem convinced it had been an accident.”





Sixty-Five



THE NFL OWNERS AND Commissioner Joel Abrams and most of his New York staff had taken up residence in the Beverly Wilshire Hotel, just off Rodeo Drive, for the league meetings.

Jenny Wolf was staying there. So was Danny Wolf, simply because in the eyes of the league he still had as much standing with the other owners as his sister did, if not more.

John Gallo had taken a suite at the Four Seasons. His plane had landed at Burbank Airport an hour ago, and he had called Danny from his limousine and told him to be waiting for him at the Four Seasons when he got there—he had already checked in.

Now he and Gallo were in the living area of his suite. Danny felt as if he’d been called to the principal’s office, as if he’d gotten caught smoking in the boys’ room.

“How could you possibly not have known about the Oprah interview?” Gallo said.

“No one knew about it until they released a few clips from it this morning,” Danny said. “They kept the whole thing buttoned up.”

He had seen Gallo angry plenty of times before, at him and at Jack, especially when the subject was Jenny. Danny thought Gallo liked going at him the most, maybe because he knew Danny would take it. It was different with Jack. Jack would at least make a show of standing up to Gallo, pushing back, if not for very long, just to reaffirm that he didn’t take shit from anybody, even though both Jack and Danny knew they were basically both making a career out of doing just that with John Gallo now.

“You and your brother assured me you were on top of this,” Gallo said. “The last thing I said to your brother was that it was time to finish her.”

Danny started to speak.

“Shut up and listen,” Gallo said. “I’d like for you to ask your brother the next time the two of you speak if he’s under the impression that a prime-time interview with Oprah Winfrey is his idea of finishing her. I’d very much like to know the answer to that question.”