Black Diamond (6 page)

“I want to see Mr. Boyle.”

The bartender and Scully both looked more closely at the only one in the pub in a suit and tie before the bartender spoke.

“I don't remember Mr. Boyle sayin' he wanted to see you. Who are ya?”

I took a Devlin & Knight business card out of my pocket. I wrote two words on the back of it and handed it to him. I looked him dead in the eye and lowered my voice.

“Tell him it's about ten thousand dollars that's going to walk out that door in two minutes flat.”

The sardonic look on the bartender's face faded. He picked up the phone. He said a few words and looked toward the back of the pub. I could feel the cold eyes of Vince Scully taking a new interest.

The door that Binney said led to Boyle's office swung open. A fat, fiftyish, splay-footed form filled the opening. A halo of frizzy, salt-and-pepper hair framed his otherwise bald head. He was tieless in an open suit coat that probably looked better on the mannequin.

He scanned the five or six men at the bar, and locked onto me. I watched him waddle his way down the bar until he was standing behind Scully. He looked at me, but he spoke to Scully.

“Who might this be, Scully? And what makes him think I owe him ten thousand dollars?”

Scully shrugged. I kept the voice level low.

“You got the message wrong, Mr. Boyle. I'm here to give you ten thousand dollars before I leave this place.”

My heart would have leapt at any glint of uptake in Boyle's face, but there was none. It apparently needed more explanation. At least I had raised his interest.

“Would you look at this, Scully? He wants to give me ten thousand dollars just like that, if you please. Let's not keep the man waiting.”

He turned on his heels and marched back into his office. I took it as an invitation to follow. I could feel Scully following close behind.

Boyle planted himself in a chair behind an oversized desk in a room about fifteen feet square. He pulled open a drawer and plunked his feet on it. I stood at the front of the desk. My shadow, Scully, leaned against the wall behind me beside the door.

I led from my strongest suit. “Mr. Boyle, I have a check made out to cash for ten thousand dollars. Consider it a delivery made free and clear.”

“Free and clear is it, Boyo. Do you know who I am?”

Tough question. How informed I should seem was a touchy issue. When in doubt, hedge.

“Word has it you're a man of importance, Mr. Boyle.”

He looked at Scully and broke into a grin.

“A man of importance, Scully. What do you think of that?”

Scully followed suit with a grin and a nod. Neither of us knew where this little scene was going until Boyle slammed the drawer shut with a kick and stood up. The volume went up ten decibels.

“Then take your head out of your arse, you little shyster. I learned one thing on the way up. No one ever gives me a damn dime without expecting twenty cents change. The question is what do you want from me? And the first word of bullshit I hear, Mr. Scully throws you out on your arse.”

One thing was clear. Boyle enjoyed his own dramatics. The test was not to flinch. I kept the tone low. He was still holding my business card in his hand. I nodded to it.

“Turn the card over, Mr. Boyle.”

He did. He glanced at the two words I had written on the back—Erin Ryan.

I figured that would lead to a rush of comprehension and we'd get down to business. I could not have misfigured more completely. There was not a glimmer of recognition.

“So? Who the hell is this?”

I could feel my heart physically fall to the pit of my stomach. I had hoped as never before that I could make the deal for Erin's release on the spot. The total brick wall I ran into caused a dizziness that made it difficult to go on standing. Worse than that, this absurd scene that I had promoted could result in harm to Erin and Colleen. In my silence, Boyle turned to Scully behind me. He held up the card.

“You know who the hell this is, Scully?”

I was snapped back into the game when I put two realizations together. Scully was clearly up to his ears in the kidnapping. He had been the surveillance at Colleen's home all afternoon. Match that with the total oblivion of his boss, and you got the inkling that Mr. Scully was playing his own game behind Boyle's back.

Scully's nerves must have been a bit strung out. There was a slight hesitation before he shot back a quick shrug. “No, Mr. Boyle.”

I picked up the flash of a look in Boyle's eyes before he turned back to me.

“So what the hell is this about, Knight?”

“It's about a mistaken identity. My mistake. It's a business matter. I jumped to the conclusion that you were one of the parties involved. You can consider yourself fortunate that you're not. It's about to fall apart. There'll probably be indictments for anyone connected.”

Of all of the words I could have used, that one struck home. All of a sudden this lawyer and his deal that was about to bring indictments were the last things he wanted in his office. He saw what I'd hoped – that his safest move was to clean house.

“Get this bum the hell out of here, Scully. Then come back.”

I took that as an exit line. I walked through the bar and out to the sidewalk. Scully was one pace behind. When I cleared the door, I felt an iron grip on the back collar of my coat. It practically lifted me off the sidewalk and slammed me into the brick wall of the building and held me fast. Scully's face was an inch from mine. He spit the words through his teeth.

“You've got a death wish, lawyer. I'm going to grant your wish.”

I could hardly get the words out of my constricted throat, but I knew it might be my last chance to say them.

“It'll be the last thing you'll ever do, Scully. You screwed up, and you know it.”

That bought me a couple of seconds of silence, but not a loosening of the grip.

“You saw it. You saw that look. He asked if you knew the name on the card. You denied it without even reading it. You couldn't have read it from across the room, but you knew who it was. Boyle picked it up. Good luck when you go back in there.”

I heard a click down around my belt. I felt the grip tighten. Something sharp was penetrating just below my ribs. I realized that his other hand was holding a knife.

“You going to kill me here? How are you going to explain that to
Boyle? Right now you can say you saw the card when I gave it to the bartender. You kill me, and Boyle's going to want some answers.”

It was my best shot. I could only hope that Scully was a reasoning animal. During the next five seconds I could feel moisture run from the point of the knife. I knew he was drawing blood. I'd given up hope, when slowly the pain of the steel point lessened.

I used the moment to try to make sense.

“There are no police involved, Scully. You or whoever you're working for can have the ten thousand. I just want to end it.”

The fist that gripped my collar banged my forehead against the brick wall with a crack. His mouth was next to my ear. “Then get your nose out of places it doesn't belong.”

The grip on my collar tightened again. I gagged as I felt my breath cut off at the throat. He finally used the grip to throw me to the sidewalk like a rag doll.

Scully turned and walked back to the door of the pub. Before he disappeared inside, he looked down at me and made a gun of his fingers. He cocked his thumb and fired an imaginary bullet between my eyes. Imaginary or not, I thought I heard the angel choir.

By the time I got back to my apartment, the temple bells in my head were putting on a recital. I doubled the usual recipe for Motrin and wolfed down four. Within ten minutes the constant gongs were down to an occasional ding-dong. A butterfly bandage stemmed the trickle still oozing from the puncture below the ribs. A couple of squirts of Bactine soothed concerns about where Scully's knife might have been previously.

Before calling it a day, I called Mr. Devlin. I filled him in on my tête-à-tête with Binney O'Toole. That went well. He was less tickled, as was I, with my blundering into Boyle's den half-cocked.

“What in the name of the saints did you think, Michael? That he'd give you a receipt for the ten thousand and take the girl out of the closet?”

I had to admit that that was pretty much what I'd hoped. I guess I was counting on my boyish frankness to convince Boyle that after the wished-for exchange, I could guarantee no repercussions.

I decided there was no point in mentioning my little encounter with Scully on the way out. It would be like the kid who gets reamed by the teacher and then gets it again from his father when he gets home. I was more in need of a night's sleep than another pummeling.

The morning alarm at five thirty brought back reminders from previously silent muscles that Mr. Scully had gotten the best of me in
the set-to. Added to that, it was two hours earlier than my usual wake-up call.

I made a brief stop at Starbuck's for a black eye. This little known Bucky special, strong black coffee with two shots of espresso, is guaranteed to rip out the most persistent cobwebs. Combine it with a couple of Motrin and you have the true breakfast of champions, and one I hope never to have to repeat.

After the previous day, I decided to follow the physicians' oath to the letter—first do no harm. Rather than exacerbate Colleen's situation further, I focused on the case against our client Hector Vasquez.

The backstretch at Suffolk Downs, as with any horse track, is a self-contained world. Life among the trainers' barns begins sometime before dawn. Grooms, stall muckers, feeders, hot-walkers, all go into their well-practiced routines like an ant colony. The buzz and hum that thirty years ago had a southern African-American accent is now uniformly in Mexican Spanish.

Trainers move from stall to stall to check legs and ankles for heat and decide on the regimen of the day's training for each horse before the exercise riders check in for instructions.

On the drive to Suffolk Downs, I called Rick McDonough, Black Diamond's trainer, on his cell phone and asked him to leave my name with security at the gate. That greased my path directly to barn 23.

I found Rick with a cluster of riders outside the stalls where grooms were tacking up for the morning ride-outs. He was giving specific instructions to the riders for each mount when he saw me. He pointed toward the coffee shack and gestured an invitation for a cup. I nodded acceptance and went to the shack to wait.

I had two cups waiting when he ambled up with a walking gait that could only be produced by bone breaks he had suffered as a saddle bronc rider in Montana in his youth. Rick was somewhere between fifty and eighty years old. It was hard to tell, since the creased,
weather-worn skin of his face and the angular mismatch of all of his limbs could have passed for ninety.

Rick had trained racehorses for my adopted father, Miles O'Connor, back when my days began with mucking out the Augean stables on Miles's estate. They made a hell of a pair. Miles was the personification of the Harvard-trained, elite Boston trial lawyer, and Rick was a horse whisperer of mythic insights who was probably still wearing the jeans and boots he had worn when I was a stableboy. What linked them was a consummate trust and belief in the depth and truth of the character of each other. I don't think Miles had a closer friend than Rick, and it was mutual.

Rick accepted the cup of strong black caffeine I offered and leaned against the counter. He looked a good deal more life-worn and tired than the last time I saw him.

His only greeting was a shake of the head. “Hell of a thing about Danny.”

I knew he felt it as deeply as I did. He had trained both Danny and me to breeze horses in the morning workouts. I did it until I passed a hundred and twenty pounds. Danny was smaller, so he kept on until Rick had given him every trick and nuance of riding a jockey can use. Rick believed in Danny through all of the pitfalls of money and the fast life that Danny fell into. Rick was there with an offer of a mount on Black Diamond when Danny finally climbed out of the pit.

“A hell of a thing indeed, Rick.”

He just nodded.

“I better tell you up front. Hector Vasquez is being charged with his murder. I took on his defense.”

He glanced over at me with one of those looks only a face like Rick's could give.

“There's a reason, Rick. I think he's innocent. It also gives me a chance to find out what happened to Danny.”

It took him a second, but he nodded again and turned back to the cup. I understood him well enough to know he was saying it was all right. He accepted my decision.

“Tell me about Black Diamond. What was going on in that race?”

He picked up his cup and turned to lean his back against the counter.

“'Bout two months ago. I got a call. Some Irish guy. He has a breeding farm somewhere in Ireland. He was sending this horse over. Wanted me to train him.”

He walked a ways away from the counter to stand beside the track rail with no one in earshot.

“I'm gonna tell you this 'cause it might help clear Danny.”

“Clear him of what, Rick?”

“Just listen, Mike. Danny came by to give the Diamond a light gallop about this time the morning of the race. Danny seemed good.”

“Was Erin with him?”

“Yeah. She liked to watch from the rail. All the riders spoke to her. Anyway, Danny left the track about nine thirty.”

“And Erin was with him?”

“Sure. Anyway, that afternoon, I'm saddling the Diamond in the paddock for the fourth race. Danny walks up for the mount. He knows my instructions. Let the Diamond run his race. Only thing different, I told him we needed this win for the stable. Things have been a little tight.”

“So?”

“He didn't say anything. That's not like Danny. He just took the reins for a leg up, like he wanted to get it over with. Just before the pony led him off to the track, he turns around and looks at me like he's gonna say something. Only he doesn't.”