Sometimes I wonder whether Max’s sexual obsession is genuine or part of a shtick he uses to distract people. Probably both. “Tell me about this data cache. Why can’t you find it? Where could it be?”
“If I knew that, would I be here? But I need to find it quick. If I don’t, I’m a dead man. Sooner rather than later.”
“That doesn’t sound like a negative outcome to me just now.”
He gives me a wolfish grin. “I bet not. But if I go down, you do, too. Rest assured of that.”
“Who would kill you, Max? Who would be so brazen?”
“Any of my more nervous partners. There’s a code in the Poker Club, unwritten but absolutely understood. You never put another member at risk. You never take food from another’s mouth. And you never fuck another man’s wife. That’s in order of priority. If I don’t neutralize this threat to the club, then one of my partners is going to neutralize me. It’s that simple.”
“If you become a target of your partners, does Jet lose the protection you’ve been giving her for the past few years?”
His grin is almost paternal. “You figured that out, huh? What can I say? Jet’s family. She’s not blood, but she’s the mother of my grandson. And he’s a pip, boy. So, the short answer? Nobody fucks with the Matheson family. End of story.”
“But if you go down, Jet does, too?”
Max weighs his answer like a gambler calculating odds. “I’d have to say yes, that’s a lock.”
“Don’t you think you ought to warn her about that?”
“Nah. Jet’s a survivor, Goose. She doesn’t need to be told something like that. In case you haven’t noticed, she goes cold as an undertaker when she’s looking at a problem. You probably see her through rose-colored glasses. Always have, I guess. But she’s no Pollyanna.”
He’s right about that, though I don’t like to dwell on it.
“Max, nobody’s more of a survivor than you. Surely you know more about the crimes of the Poker Club than anyone but Claude Buckman. It would be nothing for you to set up a MAD situation with them.”
“Mad?” He looks confused for but a moment. “You mean mutual assured destruction?”
“Exactly. Make your own cache. Let your partners know that if they hurt you, they’ll all end up in prison. If you have to use your cache, you can cut a deal with the prosecutors.”
He laughs at my apparent naïveté. “That’s a nice idea, Goose. And if my partners were all old-timers like Buckman and Donnelly, I might try it. But you’re forgetting Russo and Cash. Russo’s brother’s a made guy. And Wyatt has six Special Forces operators on his payroll. You don’t threaten guys like that. They’d lock me in a deer freezer on Wyatt’s island and dissect me with a dull pocketknife. I figure it’d take ’em about an hour to find out where I hid whatever cache I’d created. They’ll do the same to whoever Sally left hers with, once they find out who it is.”
Max’s fear is contagious. “There’s been a rash of break-ins downtown. Lawyers’ offices. And Nadine Sullivan had her shop broken into. They cracked the safe there. Was that you, looking for this data cache Sally made?”
He’s no longer smiling. “Yeah, that was me. A guy I hired, anyway. But it wasn’t this cache I was looking for. I mean, I didn’t know last night that it existed.”
That’s one mystery solved, at least partly. “What do you mean? What were you looking for?”
“Somebody stole a couple of manila envelopes from my office. Dangerous information. I questioned Jet, and it wasn’t her. Sally denied it, too, but something told me it might be her, so I searched the house. Didn’t find anything. Then I made a list of lawyers she might have given the stuff to. I figured she might be planning to divorce me.”
Now I get it. “Why did you put Nadine on that list?”
“Because her mother and Sally had been so close.”
“What would you have done if it turned out Nadine had your stuff?”
Max’s motionless face tells me all I need to know. “She didn’t,” he says. “Let’s just leave it there.”
“Well, your guys broke into her house today. How about you put a stop to that? She doesn’t have anything.”
“Sure, no problem.”
Max’s willingness to kill over information that could hurt him reminds me that people in the normal world constantly underestimate the danger of poking into matters we don’t understand. You’d think a journalist would have learned that by now. Maybe the fact that I know all the players in this situation is what blinds me to the danger.
“So you just found out about this cache Sally put together?”
He nods. “Arthur Pine told me about it this morning, at the jail.”
“How did Arthur know about it?”
“Sally called Claude Buckman sometime last night, before killing herself. I don’t understand it, man. She must have hated me at the end. She wanted to destroy me.”
He’s sticking to the suicide story. “And it’s all Poker Club stuff?”
“Most of it involves the paper mill deal.”
“Did you screw Nadine’s mother, Max?”
He looks amused by the question. “Margaret? Every way you can think of, boy, plus ten more. Her husband ran out on her, so she needed it. She’d got tired of him even before he took off, though. He wasn’t up to her level. Margaret was smart as a whip, just like her daughter. I’d like to hit that once or twice. Just to see if the blood runs true.”
Seeing my face, Max guffaws, enjoying himself immensely. “Yeah, I saw Nadine drive up here and send Jet running. Where’s she hiding? Back bedroom? Should I pay her a visit? Is she decent? Or is she better than that?”
I come to my feet at this.
Max only laughs louder. “Take it easy, Goose. I’m not going back there. But somebody needs to break that girl down like a shotgun. She’s got that buttoned-up librarian thing goin’ on, like Shirley Jones in The Music Man. And I know you ain’t doin’ it justice.”
I walk over to the island and lean against it. Max is kicked back in my chair like he has all night to shoot the breeze. Right now I’d like to call Jet and tell her to set her Seychelles plan in motion. If it worked, Tommy Russo might put a bullet in Max’s ear by morning. I’m also thinking of the passwords behind Sally’s sapphire pendant. If those are the key to whatever cache Sally put together, then I’d like nothing more than to do exactly what Max has asked me to do—find it.
“What are you thinking, Goose?” Max asks. “Don’t get tricky on me.”
Nadine’s request bubbles up to the surface. “Tell me something about your alibi. Who told Sally that you’d slept with Margaret Sullivan?”
The levity goes out of his face, replaced by the animal cleverness that’s kept him above ground and out of jail all his life.
“Come on,” I press. “I mean, how many people could have known you were doing Margaret Sullivan?”
He’s clearly weighing the pros and cons of answering. “Why do you want to know?”
“What do you care? Unless the whole story’s a lie. Even if it is, I don’t work for the DA. Plus, you own my ass, right?”