Montaro Caine (31 page)

“Priscilla thinks she knows a great deal more than she, in fact, does. Her parents are somewhat of a disappointment to her, since she’s convinced that they don’t know nearly as much as she does. It’s a typical teenage assessment; she’s spoiled, but not rotten. Not yet. There are strong, steady hands on the parental controls still. And they will continue to guide Priscilla with loving concern and with respect. Priscilla is not a bad person, Chief. She’s a pain in the butt a lot of the time and a little too selfish and self-centered at other times. My call on Priscilla Caine is that she’s a good kid with lots of room for improvement.”

“Thank you, Mr. Whitcombe.” Chief Masterson rose from his seat. “I thank you all for coming in. We will be in touch when we decide whether we will be going forward with the charges.”

Cecilia and Montaro shook hands with Chief Masterson. Then Priscilla stood and did the same. Whitcombe followed her and Nick followed Whitcombe.

The chief pumped Nick’s hand firmly. “Where’re you parked, Nick?” he asked.

“Out back,” Nick said.

“Good. I’ll walk you to your car. There’s something I’d like to ask you.”

“O.K.” Nick turned to Priscilla, who was waiting in the doorway, and waved. “I’ll talk to you later, Prissy.”

Priscilla waved to him, then followed her parents and Whitcombe out of the chief’s office. The chief watched them go, then closed the door.

Turning to face Nick, he said, “I wanted to tell you this in private, Nick. You don’t need to worry about Priscilla being pregnant. Her parents had her checked. She just missed her period for whatever reason. That’s all. No pregnancy. I know you’re glad to hear those words.”

“I sure am,” Nick said sheepishly.

“Come on, we’ll go this way to your car.”

Chief Masterson led Nick from his office through a rear door that opened into a back hallway. The two men walked until Chief Masterson suddenly stopped in front of a closed door. “Let’s just stop in here for a second.” He opened the door and gestured for Nick to enter.

When Nick saw who was in the room, he gasped. There, seated at a table before him, were Norton Lightman and Millard Wilcox. Between them was Frankie Naples. Spread out on the table was the hundred thousand dollars he had turned over to Frankie less than an hour and a half earlier.

“I’m sure you know these gentlemen. Business acquaintances of yours, aren’t they?” the chief asked Nick.

Nick stared at Lightman’s and Wilcox’s detective badges, then lowered his eyes to meet those of the young man seated at the table like trapped prey. He saw only panic and resignation in the eyes of the once feisty bundle of energy he knew to be Frankie Naples.

“Sit down, son.” Chief Masterson indicated the unoccupied chair beside Frankie and Nick numbly obeyed. When he was seated, the chief continued. “Read him his rights, Joe.”

Dazed, Nick Corcell suddenly thought he could see everything clearly. He thought he had been so clever and careful, but it had all been a setup, probably even the words he had spoken on behalf of Priscilla Caine. No one would press any charges against her; society protected rich bitches like that girl, and working class folk like him always paid the price.

Nick listened to Detective Joseph Delconsini, the man Nick knew as Norton Lightman, monotone the familiar words that he had heard so often on TV procedurals—
you have the right to remain silent; anything
you say or do can and will be held against you
. When the detective finished, Masterson sighed deeply, then spoke. “So, my babies, with time off for good behavior, each of you will be locked away for no less than ten years. By the time you get out of the slammer, the world will have passed you by.” He glanced at Nick. “College will have passed you by, son. You will probably spend the rest of your miserable life on the dung heap of society, eating shit. Which is, as far as I’m concerned, exactly where you belong.”

The ring of a wall phone interrupted him. Detective Howard McGraw, who had been known to Nick as Millard Wilcox, stepped over to the phone. “Yeah,” he said into the mouthpiece. “Yeah. Right. O.K.” He jerked the receiver toward Masterson. “For you, Chief.”

Masterson scurried across the room, grabbed the receiver from McGraw’s hand, and growled into it. “Yeah? All right, we’ll be right there.” He hung up, looked at his detectives, and made his way to the door. “We’ll be back in a few minutes,” Masterson told Nick and Frankie. “Don’t get any ideas about walking out the back door. It’s locked. As you probably know, you’re entitled to one phone call. Think about how you want to use it.”

Masterson followed his detectives out of the room, closing the door behind him.

“Bullshit. It’s all bullshit,” Frankie blurted out when they were gone.

“What is?” Nick asked weakly.

“That phone call. Them leaving the room. It’s all bullshit. They want to make a deal. That’s what they’re fishing for. But they want us to ask for it.”

“What kind of deal, man?” Nick asked anxiously.

“They want our guys in Boston,” Frankie told him lowering his voice.

Nick noticed that his hands had begun to shake.

“We could do it. We could walk out of here like nothing ever happened,” Frankie said. “I can take this money on to Boston just like I’m supposed to.”

Nick nodded his head in the direction the cops had gone. “And what do they get?”

“They get you and me, a couple of scratchers, working on the inside for them.”

“How do you know?” Nick asked.

“I can smell it. Sometimes you know things without seeing or hearing ’em. Sometimes you gotta rely on your other senses, kid,” said Frankie. “The question is how bad do you want to stay out of the warehouse? We’ve got a shot we play our cards right.”

“Our cards?” Nick thought. He considered the Caines and their pretty Westport mansion and he considered his mom and her husband’s two-bedroom apartment in South Boston. He thought of Priscilla who would be going off to college in a couple of years, and he thought of himself in prison.

“What would I have to do?” he asked.

Montaro Caine was behind the wheel of his Mercedes, speeding along Route 7, joining the rapid flow of vehicles rushing toward Connecticut. Cecilia, who was never comfortable on highways, kept her eyes focused on the speedometer. But she waited until the car was traveling well above the speed limit before she offered a gentle reminder.

“Better late than never, honey. Get us home in one piece, O.K.?”

Caine’s foot eased up on the gas pedal as he briefly glanced over to his wife. “Sorry,” he said with a distant smile.

Silence fell as Caine found his mind had already drifted many, many miles away from the Berkshires; he was thinking of coins and Fitzer Corporation and Matthew Perch and of all those other roles he had to play when he wasn’t being father and husband, responsibilities that he didn’t always know how to shoulder properly. As always, he would have to rely on the example set by his grandfather, whose ninety-ninth birthday was rapidly approaching; how much longer could Montaro rely on the wisdom of P. L. Caine, he wondered. At least a few more years, he hoped. So lost in his own thoughts was he that when he paused to glance down at the dashboard clock, he realized that nearly an hour had passed since they had left Stockbridge. He looked up into the rearview mirror and saw his daughter’s reflection.

“Priscilla,” he said. She lifted her eyes to meet his gaze in the mirror. “That’s the last you’ll see of Nick Corcell.” Her father spoke in the no-nonsense tone Priscilla had learned early in life never to challenge. “I’m sorry. Your mother and I will do everything we can to help you ride this through, but you won’t be seeing Nick again.”

Tears instantly welled up in Priscilla’s eyes. She felt a rage against her parents, wanted to lash out at them. Cecilia half turned in her seat to look at her enraged child and reached out to her, but Priscilla ignored the gesture. “That really sucks, Daddy. I mean that really fucking sucks!” she blurted out, before collapsing into sobs.

Still, as her father drove along the Merritt Parkway and Priscilla was able to dry her eyes and catch her breath, she found herself beginning to develop some small new hope. If the events of the past weeks and the experience of seeing her father’s name in the newspapers in association with the mining disaster and the Fitzer takeover rumors had taught her anything, it was that Montaro Caine might not always be as right as his daughter had once thought him to be. Her father had said that she would never see Nick Corcell again, and he seemed sure of himself, but as for Priscilla, she was not so sure that Nick would disappear from their lives quite so easily.

As for Nick himself, he was cruising toward Boston along the Massachusetts Turnpike with what he felt to be a new lease on life. Frankie Naples had left Stockbridge a half hour earlier with the hundred thousand dollars in the trunk of his car. Nick wasn’t wearing his confining, fancy suit anymore, and the sunshine had never felt so good against his back. As far as Nick was concerned, the rich Connecticut bitch and her big-time parents were history. Bruce Springsteen was singing “Working on a Dream” on the radio, and Nick didn’t even feel moved to shut it off.

In fact, Nick turned the volume of the stereo louder and began singing along up until the moment when he became aware of a black sedan riding close behind him, flashing highway lights at him. Assuming the driver wanted to pass, Nick pulled right, but the car remained behind him. Looking into his rearview mirror, Nick could see that two men were inside the sedan, wearing sunglasses; the man in the passenger seat was waving, gesturing for him to pull off the turnpike.

The men could have been undercover cops from the Stockbridge P.D., friends of Frankie Naples, or members of the Boston outfit—Nick had no idea. The only thing Nick knew for sure was that whoever was in that car was someone he didn’t want to talk to. He briefly considered flooring his VW, but he knew that the Beetle could never compete with the eight-cylinder American sedan behind him. Good looks and a polite manner had gotten him through every scrape he’d ever been in; he’d have to hope that would prove true again. Resigned, he signaled a turn into the right lane, then got off at the Newton exit.

Nick parked the car in the first parking space he saw—in front of an upscale coffee shop called Taste—and the sedan pulled in behind him. He got out of his car at the same time as the men in their dark suits and sunglasses.

“How can I help you, officers?” Nick said with a smile as he approached them. They looked like Federal agents or narcs, Nick thought, but when they flashed their business cards at him, he understood that they were neither.

“We’re not cops, Nick,” said the bulkier of the two men. “My name is Alan Rothman and this is Carlos Wallace. I think you might be able to help us.”

D
ESPITE THE BEST EFFORTS OF
M
ONTARO
C
AINE AND HIS ASSOCIATES
, meetings with government officials to discuss the significance of the coins and the prophecies of Matthew Perch and Luther John Doe yielded no useful results. Alfonse Alfaro, the bald, bespectacled New York senator with his familiarly chubby face and thinning gray hair, quickly agreed to a meeting. But when Caine and Howard Mozelle revealed that they weren’t interested in discussing either the senator’s reelection campaign or his committee’s ability to influence mining safety legislation, he quickly adjourned the meeting and directed one of his secretaries to facilitate an appointment for the men with NASA’s chief of staff. The NASA rep informed Caine and Mozelle that he wasn’t at liberty to discuss whether he would or wouldn’t act upon the information they had given him, after which the men met with the deputy director of Homeland Security, who said that his agency’s funding had been slashed, and the men really needed to be talking to the FBI.

Anna Hilburn’s efforts to determine the whereabouts of Whitney and Franklyn Walker were proving to be no more successful. Whitney’s uncle Frederick and cousins said that Whitney and Franklyn were on vacation, but none of them knew where. Whitney’s uncle had sent a letter to the couple, but had received no response. Lawrence
Aikens learned that Cordiss Krinkle was spreading the word that the couple was safely ensconced in some European country, but neither Aikens nor Curly Bennett was able to learn in which country that might be. And, after Aikens met with Montaro, both men agreed that whatever information Cordiss was spreading was probably false anyway. Near the end of a week’s worth of fruitless meetings, unproductive phone calls, and unanswered emails, Montaro understood something that P. L. Caine had impressed upon him when he was just a boy—that he would always have to rely on himself.

P. L. Caine’s ninety-ninth birthday celebration was held in the retirement community of Seaview Estates in Carmel. During Montaro’s childhood, P.L.’s birthday parties were lively and extravagant affairs, where the Canadian Club flowed freely, but now that P.L. had outlived just about all of his contemporaries, this birthday celebration was comparatively subdued—in attendance were a few friends P.L. had met at Seaview as well as Montaro and his family. The red velvet cake with white frosting was barely large enough to accommodate all the candles that Cecilia Caine had placed upon it.