The House of Wolves (House of Wolves #1)(67)

“I must say,” Elise Wolf said to him, “you were rather vague about the need to see me this evening.”

He let that one go for the moment.

“Have you heard from Jenny?” Cantor said. “You must be happy for her that she got to hold on to the team.”

“I suppose happy is one way to look at it,” she said. “It was at her brother Daniel’s expense, of course. So there’s that.”

“But your late husband clearly wanted her to take over the running of the team,” Cantor said, “or he wouldn’t have left the team to her.”

“My late husband wanted many things, usually when he wanted them,” she said with a dismissive wave of her hand. “And he often didn’t consider the consequences of what he wanted at any given time.”

She was dressed as if about to leave for some kind of formal reception. Black dress. A strand of pearls around her neck. A diamond ring on her left hand that looked big enough and even strong enough to light the rest of the house if there were some kind of power failure—even bigger than the rock Rachel Wolf had been wearing when he’d met her for drinks. Elise Wolf’s attitude, just in the few minutes Cantor had been here, was a combination of haughtiness and impatience, as if she were talking to the help.

She was exactly the way Jenny described her: a piece of work.

“Do you often conduct your interviews at this time of night?” she said to him. “And your business?”

She was sipping sherry. She’d offered him something to drink, but he said he was working.

“My business is rather transactional, Mrs. Wolf,” he said, “and often involves the exchange of information.”

“I’m quite sure I’m not following you. Are you being intentionally opaque?”

“I’m trying to quit.”

“You really are impertinent, aren’t you?”

He couldn’t help himself. He felt himself grinning. “You have no idea.”

“I might remind you that I don’t have all night.”

Jenny must have been raised by real wolves, Cantor thought, not for the first time.

Or maybe the real kill-or-be-killed Wolf was seated across from him in her high-backed antique chair.

“I’m really only here to ask you one question, which happens to be the same one I’ve already asked another member of your family.”

“I’m waiting.”

“How come when I spoke to you last week you didn’t think your son Thomas showing up here about an hour before he died was worth sharing with me?” Cantor said.





Seventy-Nine



JOHN GALLO HAD PLACED no calls to either Jack or Danny Wolf, nor had he taken calls from them, since their sister had gotten the votes she needed in Los Angeles, having somehow defied gravity on a day when she was supposed to crash and burn.

The brothers had both been so sure. So had the commissioner, now fully in the pocket of Gallo and his associates. So, too, had her crisis manager, that grasping little twerp. But John Gallo had made the mistake of convincing himself it was a sure thing. That wasn’t his nature. He never trusted that a job was done until it was impossible for it to be undone.

Gallo heard a single rap on his door and called out “Enter” as Erik Mason came into his office, immediately apologizing for being late, saying he had run into a series of closed roads this afternoon.

“No need to explain,” Gallo said. “On the rare occasions when you are a few minutes late, you always have a very good reason.”

Erik Mason was the person in his organization John Gallo trusted the most. And the one who was most fiercely loyal to him. He was a former LAPD cop, tall and lean, all hard angles and edges and an almost military bearing that Gallo thought was part of his DNA. From the time he had hired him away from his job overseeing security for Joe Wolf, Gallo had never seen Mason in anything other than a black suit, white shirt, and black tie, despite the frequent changes in the San Francisco weather.

Mason was head of Gallo’s security now, his body man, as the expression went, even his occasional driver. But perhaps more than anything else, Erik Mason was a fixer. What was the name of the character in that TV show Gallo used to watch? Ray Donovan? Erik Mason was that kind of fixer for John Gallo. And more, when more was necessary.

“Have you given any further thought to our conversation this morning about Ms. Wolf?” Gallo said as Mason took a seat in front of him.

Mason’s black shoes, as always, gleamed.

“I have, sir.”

“And have you come up with any ideas about how I should deal with the current situation?”

“As a matter of fact, sir, I do have some thoughts on this matter.”

“As I expected you would,” Gallo said.

“As you knew I would.”

Gallo liked to refer to Mason as his top cop. And with Gallo, Mason had found the kind of structure he’d missed since he’d been fired from Robbery-Homicide in Los Angeles after a career-long habit of making up rules as he went along and after what Gallo considered a rather impressive history of excessive force.

On the way to work this morning, Mason driving him today, Gallo had told him that he didn’t just want Jenny Wolf out of the National Football League. He wanted her out of San Francisco when they were finished with her.