I WONDERED IF HE could hear me breathing.
“Whoever the fuck this is better have a good reason for waking my ass up at this hour,” he said.
Still I said nothing.
Finally he said, “Well, fuck you, Mr. Unknown Caller,” and hung up.
That’s Ms. Unknown Caller to you, I thought.
AGAINST ALL ODDS I then managed to get a few hours of sleep, having set an alarm for eleven o’clock. Then I called Gabriel Jabari back, this time from my cell. He asked how I’d gotten the number. I told him he’d given it to me when he tried to hire me that day in his car, even though he most certainly had not.
“Why are you calling me?” he said.
“To invite you to lunch,” I said.
“Why would I want to do that?” he said.
“Because I want to share some information I have connecting you to the death of Lisa Morneau,” I said.
Now I could hear his breathing.
“Wait,” he said. “What? She’s dead?”
“Somebody shot her in the head.”
“When?”
“Early this morning,” I said. “Over in The Fens.”
“I don’t know anything about that,” he said.
“As I said, I have information that might suggest otherwise,” I said.
“Well whatever information you think you’ve got is bullshit information, is what it is,” he said. “I haven’t seen the woman since the night she came to the club.”
“Sea Grille,” I said. “Almost right across the street from where you live.”
He waited and then said, “One o’clock.”
I’d wanted to get his attention, and knew I had succeeded. Now I wanted to see his reaction when I showed him my cards. Look ’em in the eye, Phil Randall had always said.
Before leaving for the Sea Grille, which was part of the Boston Harbor Hotel, I called Spike back. He let me tell him everything that had happened since our last phone call without interrupting. When I finished he said, “It’s got to be one of them. Tony or Gabriel.”
“Maybe it’s as simple as Jabari wanting to hurt Tony as badly as he could by taking away something—or someone—Tony could never get back,” I said. “What better revenge than that?”
“We still don’t know revenge for what,” Spike said.
“Maybe I can learn that at lunch today,” I said.
“You’re so good at drawing people out,” he said, “at least until they threaten to shoot you.”
“I still don’t see Tony for this,” I said.
“Unless he was lying to you all along about why he wanted her back,” Spike said. “And she did have something on him. And was reckless enough or just plain dumb enough to think she could use it against him. Then he shot her. Or, more likely, Ty Bop did.”
He paused. “I assume there was no bullet or casing found?”
“Nope.”
“Let’s say for the sake of this conversation he did do it,” Spike said. “Why call you after he did?”
“Head fake? To give himself cover, at least with me?”
“Why leave the phone?”
“I’ve been asking myself that same question,” I said.
“You think maybe you were supposed to find it?” Spike said.
“Been asking myself that, too,” I said. “Maybe if it is Tony, he wanted to point the finger at the other guy.”
“Or the other guy gets careless this time,” Spike said. “Or didn’t roll her over and check.”
“In which case,” I said, “it would be like Lisa pointing the finger at him.”
I sighed, with feeling.
“Do you ever long for a simpler life?” I said.
“I actually used to have one before I started hanging around with you,” he said.
We agreed to meet for a drink later at his place. Before leaving the house I took a picture of Lisa’s call log with my own phone. Then I left Lisa’s phone in the small safe on the top floor of the house, where I had my studio. The safe was now behind one of my paintings, of the Marblehead Lighthouse, from a photograph I’d once taken from Chandler Hovey Park when Jesse Stone and I had taken a ride over there.
When I got to the Sea Grille, Gabriel Jabari was already seated at a table near the window, facing the dock and the water. I passed Gled, who sat at a chair in the lobby near the hostess stand with a direct view of Jabari’s table.
Jabari was wearing a tight-looking black blazer, buttoned, over a white shirt. I was business casual, dressed for success, black pants and a blue collared shirt, just slightly darker than a blue cable sweater vest. My .38 was in my purse.
The water and sky seemed to be the same color today. If you looked far enough out, it was almost impossible to distinguish where the ocean ended and the sky began.
When I was seated Jabari said, “Are we really going to eat?”
“I’m buying,” I said.
“No shit,” he said.
We ordered drinks and food at the same time. He ordered the Cobb salad with shrimp, and a spicy Bloody Mary. I went with the kale Caesar and sparkling water.
When the waitress left he said, “I didn’t fucking do it.”
“Didn’t say you did.”
“But you said you had evidence connecting me to it,” he said.
“I do!” I said brightly.
I took my phone out of my purse and clicked on the picture I’d taken of Lisa’s phone, one that showed only his number.
“That’s your number,” I said.
“I know my damn phone number,” he said. “Doesn’t prove nothing.”
“She placed that call to your number not long before someone shot her in the head,” I said.
“Proves nothing,” he said again.
“Proves she called you while she was still alive,” I said.
“Somebody called me from that phone,” he said. “I was still at the club. I usually don’t pick up when I see UNKNOWN CALLER. This time I did, for some reason. Only nobody says anything at the other end. I finally told them to fuck off and hung up.”
“As you did with me when I called you early this morning,” I said.
“That was you?” he said.
“I needed to find out whose number it was,” I said.
“Somebody’s trying to set me up,” he said.
Our food and drinks came then. Again he waited until the waitress was gone.
“Natalie says that you have a long-standing grudge against Tony,” I said. “One you neglected to mention either of the previous times we spoke.”
“Got nothing to do with somebody shooting Lisa,” he said.
“You wanted me to find her for you instead of Tony,” I said.
“Find her,” he said. “Not kill the bitch.”
I let that go.
“If you wanted to inflict the most possible pain on Tony, why not kill her if you found her yourself?” I said.
“Didn’t.”
“You say.”
He was, I noted, an almost obsessively neat eater. He had lifted the shrimp out of his salad and lined them up on his butter plate. Then he had carefully cut up the lettuce. I wondered, if he’d wanted the salad to be chopped, why he hadn’t just asked.
“Listen to me,” he said. “You got to understand something, once and for all. It’s Tony I want to fuck with here. I had no truck with her.”
He pointed at my phone.
“You tell him yet that there was a call to me?” he said.
“No.”
“That the truth?”
“I have no reason to lie to you,” I said.
“You going to tell him?”
“Only if I think it gets me to where I want to go,” I said.
“Might start a war, you do,” he said.
“I was under the impression that’s what you wanted,” I said.
He drank some Bloody Mary, wiped the corners of his mouth with his napkin.
“I’ll be the one to take it to him when the time comes,” he said. “Not the other way ’round.”
“What did he do to you?” I said.
“Doesn’t matter what it was,” Gabriel Jabari said. “Just that it was.”
He seemed in no rush to work his way through his salad. Every few bites he would cut off a small piece of blackened shrimp.
“What is your relationship with Tony’s ex-wife?” I said.
“What did she say it was?”
“She said you two go way back.”
“That’s a fact,” he said.
“She hates him, too,” I said.
He smiled. “Sometimes you can build a dream on shit like that,” he said.
Then he took what looked to be a final sip of his Bloody Mary. He hadn’t touched his celery stalk. It showed me an iron will. I could never resist.
“I’m done,” he said.
“You haven’t finished your food,” I said.
“Meant that I’m done with you,” he said. “At least for now.”
He stood. I looked up at him and said, “I’ll be in touch.”
“Or,” he said, smiling again, “maybe it will be the other way around.”
He walked past the hostess stand and I watched as he and Gled made their way in the direction of the front lobby. When they were out of sight, I put on my leather gloves and reached across for the stem of his water glass and slid it to my side of the table. Then I looked around the room to see if anybody was watching me, leaned down, opened my purse, and placed my napkin inside it.
Then I turned slightly toward the window and the dock and the water and the gray afternoon, and gently placed Jabari’s glass on top of the napkin before closing the purse.
If Gabriel Jabari were in the system, so were his prints. Which I now had.
No such thing as a free lunch.