IS THERE ANY point in me asking how you got in?” I said.
I honestly couldn’t remember if I’d set the alarm or not. Even when I told myself to set it every time I went out, sometimes I forgot.
“It was Gled,” he said. “He’s good at shit like this. Met him in Little Odessa a while back.” He paused. “In Brooklyn.”
I told him I knew where Little Odessa was.
“No shit,” Gabriel said, “before that the boy was with the damn KGB. His specialty was making people disappear.”
“Good to know,” I said.
I took the chair across the coffee table from Gabriel.
“Why are you here?” I said.
“I want to ask you if you’re trying to get me killed,” he said. “Why the fuck did you tell Tony my real name?”
“I didn’t,” I said.
“Well, somebody did,” Gabriel said.
“The cop who told me, she wouldn’t talk if you waterboarded her,” I said. “And the only other person I told was my father.”
“Who I hear is a cop,” he said.
“Retired.”
“Well,” he said, “somebody told Tony. Who got word to me couple of nights ago that I better back the fuck off, because next time he wasn’t missing. Me and Gled, we been on the move a little bit ever since.”
“I haven’t talked to him since either he killed Lisa or you did,” I said.
“How many times do I got to tell you it wasn’t me?” he said.
“Till I convince myself it wasn’t you?”
He was in a black suit, a black shirt, and a black tie. Shiny black cap-toed shoes. Sapphire cuff links that looked real to me. He’d become some dude since Dannemora.
“Let’s back up,” I said. “How’d you go from Gabriel Lister to Gabriel Jabari?”
“Never saw myself as a Lister,” he said.
“So how’d you come up with Jabari?”
“There was a basketball player at Duke had that name,” he said. “I just tried it on for size one day and thought it fit me like this suit I got on right now. Put me in touch with my African roots.”
Rosie got off her back but stayed where she was, letting him rub her neck, the little tart.
“How long have you been planning to come after Tony?” I said.
“Since Jermaine,” he said. “But I was only fifteen at the time. Wasn’t ready. Living with an aunt. Natalie was doing everything back then to keep me out of her world. And Tony’s. I don’t think she ever told him about me. Turned out to be a good thing.”
“And Natalie was willing to wait while you were reinventing yourself?” I said.
“We both buy into all that shit about revenge best being served cold,” he said. “Natalie just knew that when I finally did make it back to Boston, it would be time. Only now everything has gotten fucked up, including me losing the damn element of surprise.”
“Did you tip the cops about Tony’s houses?” I said.
He showed me all those white teeth. “Probably was just a concerned citizen doing that,” he said.
“Where do you think Tony is right now?” I said.
“I find him, you’ll be the first to know,” he said. “Time to stop fucking around and end this thing, so I can get on with my business.” He smiled again. “And his.”
“I didn’t tell him about you and Jermaine and Natalie,” I said.
“You sure you didn’t tell anybody else besides your father?”
“Just him and Rosie the dog,” I said.
“Ask you something?” he said. “Where were you when you talked to him?”
“In my kitchen,” I said.
He nodded, then put a finger to his lips and got up and walked out the front door, motioning for me to follow him. Gled did the same. The three of us walked all the way out to where the Navigator was parked.
“Maybe you being surveilled,” he said. “You ever think of that?”
I had not.
“By Tony?” I said.
“Uh-huh,” he said. “Didn’t you ask me one time if I broke in here? Maybe it was just another time when you had it wrong on me.”
It had never occurred to me, not once, that the break-in could have been not to find something but to plant something. But maybe it should have.
Jabari said, “Gled, you go back in the kitchen now and do that spyware shit you do for me sometimes, see if you can find a little something something.”
“He can do that?” I said.
“One more thing he learned in the mother country,” Gabriel said.
To Gled he said, “Me and her will go back and sit back down in the living room and keep talking some shit to each other. You find anything, you come get us.”
Gled reached into his pocket, came out with what looked to me like the newest version of the iPhone. He placed it in the palm of his left hand, the one in the sling, tapped on some keys.
“His phone is a bug detector?” I said.
“Uh-huh,” Gled said. “So is yours if you are knowing how to work it and be finding EMF.”
“EMF,” I said.
“Electromagnetic field,” he said.
“Think of him as a high-tech meter reader,” Gabriel said. “We go somewhere for a meeting with people I ain’t vetted to my satisfaction, Gled here does a quick sweep, so I know it’s not the same as them wearing a wire.”
We all went back inside. Gabriel Jabari told stories about prison, and more about how he’d made his way back to Boston. It didn’t take Gled long. Ten minutes later he motioned to me from the entrance to my kitchen. When we were both in there, he got down on his hands and knees. So did I. Underneath the butcher-block table, stuck in a corner, was what looked to all the world like a small black lug nut.
Gled checked the rest of the house after that. When he finally came back downstairs he looked at Gabriel and shook his head. When the three of us were back outside, Gabriel said, “You ought to start trying to figure out what else whoever planted that thing knows you don’t want them to know. You said you was being followed, right?”
“I was.”
“Maybe they just hedging their bets.”
“All I want to know is who killed those women,” I said. “I just need a little more time.”
“Well, you out of time,” Gabriel said. “Because if I find Tony Marcus before you do . . .”
Gled opened the back door of the Navigator for him. Gabriel got in.
“Funny how this shit can work out, you think about it,” Gabriel said. “Might be the people you can trust the most on this thing right now are my sister and me.”
I told him he might be right. Gled closed the door. But before he walked around and got into the driver’s side, he whispered something in my ear.
As I was headed back up the walk, I heard Gabriel call out to me.
“Cute damn dog,” he said.