Stash (20 page)

Jude introduced her to Da Da. Vicki wore a strapless black dress that showed her smooth tan shoulders and squeezed her small breasts into a respectable cleavage, between them a rose tat inked like a target into her skin.

“Please sit, and say hello to Da Da Sweet,” Jude said to her. He turned to Sweet. “If you’ll excuse me.”

Sweet stood when Jude did and shook his hand. “Soon, bro.”

Please, not
bro
, don’t call me that. At least the handshake was normal.

Walking back toward the kitchen, Jude ran into Andrew, who stood with his arms folded across a clean chef’s jacket he’d put on to walk the dining room.

“Look at her,” Andrew said. “Sitting down like that.”

“Who? Vicki? The dining room’s closed. I asked her to come over.”

Andrew shook his head. “I’ve been thinking we should let her go. She’s a half hour late for every shift.”

“Is that the only problem?”

“Isn’t that enough? The dining room opens and we don’t have a hostess to seat people.”

“Move her start time up a half hour and she’ll be on time. So it costs a few extra bucks a week.”

Andrew considered this.

“She’s good at VIP entertainment,” Jude added.

Vicki had cozied up to Sweet. He slid his drink to her and she tried it and licked her lips. Sweet’s teeth blazed, his eyes roaming Vicki’s dress.

“New customer?” Andrew asked.

“Mr. Big.”

Andrew made a clicking sound with his teeth. He knew about Jude’s other business, although he didn’t participate except to take his points.

Simon approached, carrying four dinner plates in his arm. “I put it in the safe,” he said.

“Okay, thanks.”

Simon motioned to table eighteen across the dining room. “Guy over there wants to speak with you.”

“Me?” said Andrew.

“Jude. He said he needed to see the manager.”

Simon delivered his plates to another table. Jude walked toward eighteen, a couple out for dinner, looked like a special occasion, dressed in their nice clothes. Sports coat and tie for him, sleeveless dress and gold necklace for her. Usually if Jude was called to a table of unknowns it was to field a complaint—prices, a weak drink, an overdone steak.

“Hi, how are you,” Jude said. He introduced himself, offered his hand, the guy first. “I’m Jude Gates.”

“This is our first time here. We just wanted to tell you how great our dinner was.” The guy shook, but no name back. The wife shook, too, hands dry as hay.

“I loved my halibut,” the woman said. “It was so tender.” She was prettier up close, tired but sexy, as if she’d been through it but could go another lap around. They both had that look.

“Andrew—the chef—he’s really outstanding,” Jude said. “I was just telling someone else that he creates both a healthy and tasty menu.”

“Our waiter was very nice, too.”

“And my drink,” the guy said, draining his glass and clinking the cubes. “It’s nice to find a place that puts a real shot in.”

“I’ll have your waiter bring another—on me,” Jude said.

“Honey, maybe you’d better not,” his wife said.

The husband narrowed his eyes at her, then shrugged.

“I’m glad you’re having a good time.” He tried to get a bead on these two—what did they want? Something.

“I saw you talking with that fella over there—he looks familiar, like a celebrity or someone,” the man said. “I can’t quite place him.”

He meant Sweet.

Jude said, “He gets that a lot. I don’t know if it’s because he’s big or has nice teeth.”

“I think we’ve seen him in a movie,” said the woman. “Is he an actor?”

“You’re right, I think he’s an actor,” the man said.

“What movie? Was it
Rocky?”

“Sweetheart, that was thirty years ago. That guy would have been a little baby. Now who is he?”

“I really can’t tell you,” Jude said. “I have to respect his privacy, of course.”

“Oh no, we won’t bother him, we just wanted to know.”

“I didn’t mean
Rocky. Pulp Fiction.”

“No, that was—who was that in
Pulp Fiction?”

“I know, Samuel L. Jackson.”

“That’s not Samuel L. Jackson, is it? I don’t think so.”

Jude cut in. “It was nice to meet you,” he said. “Enjoy the rest of the evening.”

Rocky
. He went upstairs to his office and opened the safe and took out the package from Sweet that Simon had retrieved, an
oversized and overstuffed manila envelope taped at the seams. He ripped away one corner and counted the wrappers of one-hundred-dollar bills. They were all there, many of the bills old and wrinkled, as if collected from many sources. That’s the way he liked it. Between this cash and his own he’d have enough for Gil. This deal was a green light.

Patty loved when Bill took her to dinner; she’d gone out earlier that day and bought a new dress for the occasion, maroon and sleeveless, showing off the arms she’d toned teaching a sculpting class at the gym on Saturday mornings. And a place like Gull—she oohed and ahhed over it. Usually they went to Chili’s or Olive Garden.

Bill ordered a scotch and soda. Patty got a martini and right away turned frisky. She slid over to his side of the booth and sat close, put her hand in his lap.

The move gave her a better view, too. Gates was having dinner at a nearby table with a big black guy. Keller pointed Jude out to his wife.

“He’s cute,” Patty said.

“You ever seen him before, around town?”

She shook her head no. Keller had already filled her in about the woman he’d arrested after an accident, and how they’d found a bag of marijuana in her car. With all the recent drug incidents going on in Morrissey, Keller had gotten the DA to threaten tougher charges even though the accident and other driver’s death had not been her fault. That way, he could press the woman hard for her supplier, and the strategy had worked. He now knew it was that handsome guy sitting right over there.

“Her kids go to Morrissey East, she’s got a first grader,” Keller said.

“Not in Andy’s class?”

“No.”

“The parents, for God’s sake. No wonder children are getting in trouble.”

Not that Patty was shocked. She knew what went on. Pedophiles strolling near elementary schools. Drug dealers selling to middle-school students. Three years ago, a teenager bludgeoned his father to death, the first murder in Morrissey in five years. That involved drugs, too—the kid high on something, trying to get at his old man’s cash.

“She says it was just a friend doing her a favor, and she may be right,” Keller said. “But until you follow the breadcrumbs you don’t know.”

When Gwen Raine’s attorney called with the name, Keller kept the info close. He planned to check it before getting the state boys involved, in case there was nothing to it. Why get caught up in turf wars with other departments if you don’t have to? But Keller had another reason for doing the first leg: his personal interest in anyone who might be dealing in his town. He considered it his responsibility to clean up Morrissey, using whatever tactics were necessary. He had run everything he could on Jude Gates, which these days was a lot more than it used to be. Married, age forty-four, one daughter, Dana, age eighteen, freshman at St. Lawrence University. Residence in Loudonville, adjacent to Morrissey, upscale but not obscene. Partner with Andrew Cole in an LLC named Upstate Dining Company. Co-owner of Gull for the past six years, before that managed a restaurant called the Patriot. Drove a 2009 Lexus GS300, license plate 468-DEL. Clean driving record. U.S. passport, used eight times in the past twelve
months at two different border crossings into Canada, could be of interest. No priors, no convictions. A regular guy, except he worked in the restaurant industry, a known conduit for drug trafficking. Mexican dishwashers, African porters, they worked sixty hours a week in the kitchens and lived ten to a tiny house and moved product for their cartel uncle or cousin back home. Keller had never known of a restaurant that didn’t have some level of drug trade. The bartender, one of the waiters, a cook—somebody was on point, supplying the rest of the place. Usually not the owner. It would be counterproductive to have your employees stoned on the job.

Their waiter was a young kid with good manners. He talked up the halibut and Patty ordered it. New York strip steak for Keller, leave off the shiitake mushrooms. You couldn’t just get a salad. You had to get a baby Bibb salad or a spinach and pancetta salad or field greens and roasted peppers salad. They decided to share the Bibb lettuce salad.

Another drink for my wife, and I’ll take another scotch. Officially, he wasn’t working tonight.

There wasn’t much to see. Gates got up a couple times and went into the kitchen. Once he went up front to the bar for a few minutes. He stopped at a table here and there and said a few words. The staff was busy and focused. Looked like any other restaurant, Jude like any other owner.

But who was that big guy Gates sat down with? He looked familiar, or maybe just out of place.

Their dinners came, and Keller had to admit it was the best steak he’d eaten in a long time. Perfectly cooked with a pink center.

“How’s your fish?” he asked his wife.

“Melts in my mouth,” Patty said. “You should take me on stakeouts more often.”

“I wouldn’t call this a stakeout.”

“What do you think? He doesn’t look suspicious to me.”

“Let’s have a chat with him,” Keller said. When the waiter came back, Keller asked if he could speak with the manager.

When Gates came over, it was like having a conversation with the customer service rep at a bank. Gates smiled, pleased to have them at Gull, asked about their dinners. Keller tried but couldn’t get the name of the black guy. And then Patty made that comment about
Rocky
. It was brilliant, but Gates didn’t fall for it.

When their check came, Keller asked the waiter about the other guest.

“That’s Da Da Sweet, used to play in the NFL.”

“I thought I recognized him.”

“Linebacker for the Giants.”

“Is he a friend of your boss?”

The waiter shrugged. “I haven’t seen him here before. But I heard he’s opening a new health club in town. The River Rats are going to train there.”

“Maybe you could teach a class there,” Keller said to his wife.

When they left, a few people were standing at the corner of the building, smoking. With no smoking allowed inside anymore, patrons had to step outside with their cigarettes. Across the street was parked a monster black Lincoln Navigator with dark tinted windows. Hard to know if anyone sat inside. Ten to one it belonged to Sweet. Keller repeated the plate number to himself three times. Then he led Patty down the alley to the back of the restaurant. There were spaces for a few cars, one of them Gates’s Lexus. Also an Explorer, an Audi, and a commercial Ford van. He jotted down the makes and plates, added the info on the
Navigator to his notebook. He lifted the lid to the Dumpster and peered inside.

The back door opened and a worker with a white apron stepped outside. He stared at Keller and his wife and lit a cigarette.

Keller motioned with his fingers to his lips that he wanted a smoke. The apron shrugged and fished out his pack.

Keller lowered his voice. “We’re looking for something else to smoke.”

The apron looked at him, then at Patty.

He’d be pegged as a cop if Patty wasn’t with him. She was perfect cover.

“Like what?”

“Like whatever we can get,” Keller said. “It’s our anniversary and we want to celebrate,” he added.

The apron guy raised his cigarette and shook his head.

“Try the Tight Spot on Dove.”

“Yeah, I know it.”

Keller had seen enough. Not anything of substance, but enough to come back and take a second look sometime.

“Let’s go,” he said to Patty.

“You want me to drive?”

“What for?”

“You’ve had a lot to drink. You seem a little wobbly.”

“Christ, woman, get in the car.”

Marlene and Abby stopped by with the produce share from their community farm. A lot of corn still, along with broccoli, beets, a few twisted carrots. Gwen would make a beet salad for herself and Brian for dinner; Nora and Nate would eat corn and carrots with their pasta. Marlene also brought a tub of chili for Gwen to deliver to the Harrisons. Two days ago, Celeste Harrison fell down her basement stairs and broke her leg in two places. She had three children at Morrissey East and an ex-husband who lived in Philadelphia. Celeste’s sister from Albany was staying with her, and Gwen arranged to have the five Helping Hands volunteers take turns making dinner for the Harrison family until Celeste recovered. She had created a schedule and e-mailed it to her volunteers. Gwen had made lasagna last night; Marlene’s turn was today. Gwen would deliver the dinner later.

She put the produce box and tub of chili in the kitchen, then made coffee and sat with Marlene on the patio in the lounge chairs under the pergola. Shafts of sunlight filtered through the vines Brian had planted when they moved in, which after seven years had wiggled up and over the support posts and onto the overhead slats to provide shade cover in the summer.

“It’s such a gorgeous day, I can’t believe summer is over,” Gwen said.

“Are you kidding? I’m so glad school starts tomorrow. Since swimming ended all Abby says is how bored she is.”

“We’ve had a great summer—except for the accident thing. I love that Nora and Nate still want to do things with me, and that’s not going to last forever. Brian’s brother has two teenagers who want nothing to do with him.”

“By the time they’re teenagers, parents don’t want much to do with their kids, either. I think humans are wired that way.”

Gwen believed it but couldn’t imagine it. She and Nora and Nate had done so much together this summer: swimming, hikes, farm visits, bike rides, tie-dyeing T-shirts, planting flowers. They stuck together like a team. The moody teen years still seemed far away, although Gwen knew they would arrive in an eyeblink.

Abby joined Nora and Nate for a popcorn snack in the tower of the swing set. Gwen could hear them playing Cave Times, a made-up game consisting of grunting instead of speaking, and eating without using hands.