Strangled - Brian McGrory [160]
As Hank Sweeney told me in no uncertain terms, it was Commissioner Hal Harrison who wanted me dead throughout the story. Soon as I get back east, I’m going to pursue that theory, not for myself, but in the memory of Edgar Sullivan, the man who single-handedly kept me alive.
Don’t bother hanging around the courthouse waiting for Paul Vasco’s murder trial to begin. The guy’s long gone, I suspect never to be found again. Believe me when I say that Boston doesn’t do fugitives particularly well.
What else?
Maggie Kane. Never heard from her again, nor has she heard from me. I was half tempted to call her from our room and describe the view that she opted never to see, but decided it would have been more rude than funny, and really not that funny at all. I have to draw the line somewhere, odd as that might seem. And the truth is, I’m a little embarrassed about the whole thing — embarrassed for me, embarrassed for her, embarrassed for us, embarrassed that we believed something was there that never really was, and embarrassed that we walked away from it in the manner we did. That’s life, even if it shouldn’t be.
Huck? Great dog, and no one’s ever taking him away. He was staying at Peter Martin’s house for the duration of my Hawaiian vacation. Their first day together, Martin called me no fewer than twenty times asking questions about “this surly beast.” The second day he called another twenty times to say the dog was growing on him. I got a call on the third day asking for advice on getting one of his own. People surprise you all the time, even when they don’t.
Which brings me to Elizabeth Riggs. She gave a ring two weeks after she fled Boston to congratulate me on the story and to let me know that she was moving from San Francisco to Chicago. She joked, though maybe she didn’t, that it was her way of meeting me halfway. I explained that if I went and did the same thing, that would leave me in Pittsburgh — a perfectly nice city, but was that really where we wanted to spend the rest of our lives? She didn’t really laugh, and I can’t say I blame her.
“So you’re really not going to the bar?”
Mongillo again. He gets something in his mind, especially involving food or drink, and he’s incapable of letting it go.
“Mother of Christ,” I said, slowly rising to my feet. “Just to shut you the hell up, I’m on my way. What do you want?”
“Surprise me,” he replied.
I’d make certain of it.
The open-air bar had a thatched roof, a particularly facile server, and at this precise moment, a rather stunning brunette in a backless yellow sundress, sitting on a corner stool and sipping a frozen strawberry margarita that she held in her tanned and manicured hands.
“Hello, Jack,” she said, looking up at me over her drink.
“Hello, Elizabeth,” I said.
Then I added, “Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, she walks into mine.”
“Actually,” Elizabeth Riggs replied with that crinkle-eyed smile of hers, “you just walked into mine.”
She was right, actually, so I didn’t argue the point. Instead I said, “This is a long way from Chicago.”
“It’s a long way from everywhere.”
A long way indeed. I thought of the panic I felt when I held her driver’s license in my trembling hand, the sheer, unadulterated relief when I found her alive in the lobby of the Copley Plaza hotel, the empty sadness when I learned she had understandably fled town.
I glanced back at Mongillo, who had this stupid look on his big face as he looked back at me, and I thought of his simple request: Surprise me. I thought too of Elizabeth’s spot-on analysis