Chapter 1106: The Boathouse
June 1997
The boathouse was at the bottom of the lawn: a dock, two boats nobody used, and a room upstairs with a couch and a window, out of sight of the house.
It had been a boathouse when he bought the place and it stayed one. Alex liked that you couldn't see it from any window up at the house, and he'd told Muffler to change nothing but the lock. Muffler changed the lock.
Nobody ever said so, but it turned into the one room on the property where nobody came looking for him.
Muffler drove him down in the cart at nine with the headlights off. They'd done it that way since 1994. "Green sedan. Twice this week. I knocked on his window."
"And?"
"Guy selling a boat. Nice boat."
"Did you buy it?"
"On what you pay me?"
Tony carried him up the outside stairs. "Left arm. Your left, man."
The arm hung there. "I've got it."
"You have not got it. Put your weight on me, come on."
"Tony, I swear to God, if you drop me—"
"Drop you? You weigh less than my gym bag. I been carrying heavier groceries." He set him on the couch and squared the cushion behind his back with one hand, then looked at the lamp, the window and the door, and decided not to ask. "Two hours. Then I'm coming down here whether you like it or not."
"Make it three and I'll buy you that Impala you keep crying about."
"Two. You been up since five-thirty, and I don't take bribes from people in diapers." Then he went back up to the house without looking round once, and for Tony that was an achievement.
Muffler sat in the dark at the foot of the stairs, cart lights off, walkie-talkie on his knee, facing the shore path. He'd sit two hours if it was two hours. He ran security for the house, and part of running security for this house was not asking what the rooms were for.
Alex sat on the couch alone and looked out the window at the black lake and waited.
She'd flown in from Anchorage that afternoon. Cassidy had been up in Alaska since the summer before. She'd been the spokeswoman for Sarah Palin's mayoral campaign in Wasilla, and when Palin won in October she'd gone into the mayor's office as an assistant. At night Cassidy took classes at the community college up there. She wrote long letters about all of it, and Old Mike brought them down to the boathouse unopened.
Getting a week off from a two-room mayor's office took some doing, and she'd done it anyway.
He heard footsteps on the stairs.
She came at nine-twenty along the shore path in jeans and one of his old jackets with the cuffs worn through, and stopped in the doorway.
"God, you're skinny," Cassidy said.
"Everybody keeps telling me. Mimi said I looked like a coat rack. You're supposed to say I look distinguished."
She came in, shut the door and stood there with her hands in the jacket pockets in the light of the one lamp.
Then she crossed the room in three steps, went down on her knees with her arms around his waist and her face in his stomach. She was shaking and didn't make a sound. "They're right. You're nothing but bones."
He put his hands in her hair.
"I couldn't come," she said into his shirt. "Five months. I couldn't come to the hospital, I couldn't come here, Dad said if I— there were reporters, there was Mariah, there was—"
"Hey. Hey. Cass, it's fine. I wasn't exactly taking visitors."
"I flew down in February and rented a car at O'Hare, and I sat in it outside the gate like an idiot. More than once. I didn't even get out. I just sat there eating Doritos and crying."
"That's the most Cassidy thing I've ever heard."
She lifted her head and hit him in the shoulder, not hard. "Don't laugh at me. It was twelve degrees."
He got a hand out of her hair and put the back of it under her eye, where the skin was gray. "You look like you haven't slept since then."
Her thumb found his wrist. "Look who's talking."
"Me? I've been asleep since January. I'm the most rested man in Illinois."
"That's a different kind of sleep and you know it," Cassidy said, and put her cheek back against his hand.
She looked at him a long time. She'd known this face for years, and something was wrong with it now that had nothing to do with the weight. "Your face is different. Older. Like somebody went in and turned the lights down."
"Five months of hospital food through a tube will do that."
"That's not what I mean and you know it. What happened to you in there?"
"Sit up here, Cass. My neck's killing me looking down at you."
She got up onto the couch beside him and folded herself under his arm. He looked at the window and the lake. "If I asked you for something—"
"I'd say okay," Cassidy said.
"You don't even know what I'm going to ask you."
"Doesn't matter. You never ask me for anything, so it's probably important." She moved her head until it sat under his jaw. "Dad says you've got the devil's own luck. Mike says don't ask. So? What do you want me to do?"
"Your father's looking for the men who shot me. He started in February."
"I know he did. He had a map up in his garage with pins in it. The neighbors complained in April because they could see it through the window, and he put it right back up in May."
"That's your dad."
"And I'm his daughter." She said it flatly. "The second time I sat outside your gate, there was a gray Buick parked down the road with a guy in it who wasn't a reporter. Reporters eat. This guy just sat. So I walked over and knocked on his window and asked him if he was lost."
He turned his head and looked at her.
"He drove off. I got the plate. I gave it to Mike in March," Cassidy said. "He didn't ask where it came from and I didn't tell him."
"I didn't ask you to do that, Cass."
"You were asleep. You couldn't ask anybody for anything." She put her chin on his shoulder. "Somebody shot you. I was sitting out there anyway, might as well be useful."
"You walked up to a strange car on a dark road. Cass, if that guy had been who I think he was—"
"Then I'd have got a better look at him." She didn't even blink.
It was sweet, and it scared him a lot.
"That's what I'm asking. I'm making your dad stop. All of it. The map, the car, the pins."
Mottola was dead. Stringer was in New York behind a wall of Sony lawyers, and the evidence had gone to him through an FBI agent named Haines, who had friends in three field offices. A cop who kept pushing at that from a paper desk would lose the desk, or worse.
She'd gone very still.
"He'll think I'm a coward about the whole business," Alex said. "Let him think it."
The old man had taught her not to ask about things like that. "He's going to be so mad. He's going to come home and kick the lawnmower." She sighed. "Fine. I'll back you up. But you owe me."
"When do you have to go back?"
"Sunday." She sat up under his arm. "She gave me a week. She said family comes first, take a week. Then she asked me if my family was the one on the news."
"What did you tell her?"
"I said my dad's a cop and we don't watch the news." Cassidy made a face. "I could stay, you know. I could call her Monday and quit. Get a sublet somewhere. Come over here every night and make you eat."
"And park outside the gate with Doritos."
"I'd come inside this time. I'd bring Doritos for Muffler too."
"You like it up there, though. I can hear it."
She didn't answer right away. "I do. God help me. She's a nightmare in the office and she's great in a room, and I like it. I've got a class two nights a week. I've got a desk with my name on a piece of tape."
"Then go back Sunday. Keep the desk."
"Is that what you want?"
"I want you here. But you'd hate me by August, sitting in this house watching me squeeze a rubber ball."
Cassidy looked at him for a while and let that one go.
"And I don't want to just be a phone call to you, Cass, I want—"
Her hand came up and covered his mouth. "Stop right there."
He mumbled something into her palm.
"No, you listen for once." Her voice was very quiet and completely level. "Dad, fine. Sunday, fine. I'll do all of it. Just don't sit there and tell me what I want. You don't get to decide that part."
She took her hand away. "Fair enough," he said. "Then I'll tell you what I want."
"Go on, then."
"Don't marry anybody."
Cassidy took that in. Then she laughed, short and soft, like she couldn't believe him. Her chin came up. "Oh, really? Until when?"
"Until I ask you."
She was quiet a moment. Then she put her head back down on his shoulder. "Okay."
"Just okay? I'm pouring my heart out here, woman."
"What else do you want? Should I get it notarized? Want me to bring it to Mike in an envelope?" She was grinning into his collar. "Okay. I told you that's what I'd say. Now stay still, you're bony."
"Stay an hour."
"I'll stay two. Muffler can sit in the dark."
She was quiet for a second against his shoulder. "Were the nurses pretty?"
"What?"
"Five months. Somebody washed you." She didn't lift her head. "I'm asking if she was pretty."
"Her name was Doreen and she was sixty-one."
"Good," Cassidy said. "Keep it like that."
The lamp buzzed. "Come here," he said.
She came. The first kiss was bad. The angle, the arm. The second one wasn't.
"I wasn't going to marry anybody anyway," she said into his jaw. "There's nobody in Wasilla. There's a guy who fixes snowmobiles and he's got a mullet."
"Competition's that stiff, huh?"
"You should see the mullet." She was her father's daughter, though, and she couldn't leave a thing half-said. "He's still going to look for the men who shot you, you know. Dad."
"Not after I tell him to stop."
"He already half does. He said you were soft once, at Thanksgiving, and Grandma threw a roll at him."
"Your grandma's my favorite."
"I hate this, Alex. I hate him thinking that about you." She said it to the dark. "He turns fifty-five in October. He's too old to be sitting in parked cars with a gun."
"I know. You think I want him out there? Your dad gets shot over me, you kill me, and then Susie kills me again."
"Then someday, tell him the truth," she said. "Not now. When it's safe. Promise me."
"When it's safe. I promise."
The lamp went off ten minutes later.
She stayed two hours. Somewhere in the second one, with the lamp off and the lake slapping at the dock, she said, not quite awake: "She's going to ask me Monday if I had a nice time with my family."
"What'll you tell her?"
"Mm. That I did." She was asleep before he could answer.
Twice in the second hour something moved out on the water, and both times Muffler had the walkie-talkie halfway to his mouth before he put it down.
The first time it was a fishing boat with a lantern out on the shoal, same as every summer since before the house was bought. The second time it was the dock line knocking against the piling. He wasn't going to radio the house about a dock line.
Around eleven a car came slowly down the neighbor's road with its brights on, stopped at the top of the drive and sat there with the engine running.
Muffler didn't move. He put his hand flat on the seat beside him, where the thing he didn't carry up the stairs was lying, and waited. After a while the car found the house it was looking for, backed out and left.
Muffler didn't radio the house about it. The boss had a therapist at seven in the morning.
At eleven-forty Muffler heard the door. He had the path clear before she was down the stairs, drove her to the edge of the neighbor's property where she'd left her rental car, and flashed the light twice when she was safely inside it.
Then he radioed Tony to come down and carry up a man who hadn't asked to be carried, and took him up the lawn to bed.
At a payphone north of Madison, a bald man in a windbreaker listened to his pager, put two quarters in and got an old man in Highland Park out of bed.
"Say that again, Mike."
"Same thing I told you in the basement last night. He says stand down. That includes Madison," Old Mike said.
Vic switched ears. "Last night I saw the kid for ten seconds and he didn't say stand down. This is you talking, Mike."
"That's the kid talking. I'm just the mouth."
"Five months, Mike. I've been on this since February. I've got plates, I've got a bartender in Gary, I've got—"
"Keep all of it. Put it in a box. Just don't do anything with it."
"And if I don't listen?"
"Then you don't," Old Mike said, "and you and me have a conversation neither of us wants to have."
A truck went by on the highway behind him. "He say why?"
"He said you'd get it if I gave you his exact words, so here they are. 'Tell Vic I don't want him getting his fool head blown off in a parking lot over me. If people call me chickenshit, fine. I've been called worse by Susie.'"
Vic didn't say anything for a while. "Twenty-two years old and he's already talking like an old man. Shit. Shit, Mike." He kicked the bottom of the payphone. "Tell him I heard him. Tell him I think he's wrong."
"He knows. He said you'd say that too. Go home, Vic. Your ex-wife's been calling me to ask where you are, and I'm tired of lying to her for free."
He hung up, got back in the car and sat there with the engine off for a long while before he started it.
In the morning the therapist came at seven and put the ball in his right hand. "Close it."
He closed it.
"Again. Slower this time, and hold it. Don't cheat, I can see you cheating."
He held it while she counted, and somewhere in the middle the hand opened by itself and the ball rolled off the blanket onto the floor. "Good," she said, picking it up and putting it back in his palm.
"Good? It fell on the floor. Six months ago I could palm a basketball."
"Yesterday you couldn't hold it past two. Stop whining and close it, Mr. Billionaire."
The phone rang at nine. Muffler carried it over on the long cord and sat by the window with the walkie-talkie while Alex held the receiver to his ear with the good hand.
It was Sloane, from the office in the city. Lee Phillips had called her back with David Geffen's first answer about A+ Records. Geffen had paid forty-one million dollars for Alex's half of the label in March. He wasn't selling it back three months later, he said, not at forty-one and probably not at fifty. But he'd talk about pieces of it.
"Which pieces?" Alex asked.
He listened. "Then take the two floors the label rents and the A+ Records name. Leave him the rest for now. I'd rather buy it back a piece at a time than try to fight for the whole thing in one room."
Sloane said something about the price of a trademark. "I know what the name's worth. Buy it anyway." She said something else. "Then let him say no twice. Ask him again next month. Right now he wants to see me walk into a room first."
He set the receiver down on the blanket without hanging up, got his breath, and after a moment picked it up again. "One more thing. Mike talked to Vic last night. If Vic calls you, tell him it's me asking, not Mike, and he can have it in writing if he wants it in writing."
He listened. "Yeah. Those exact words. He'll get it."
He hung up. Muffler took the phone and wound the cord round his hand, and stopped at the door. "A coward, huh. Nobody who knows you is going to buy that, boss. You threw a chair at a Crip in ninety-three."
"I don't need everybody to buy it. I need Vic to buy it long enough to go home and sleep in his own bed. Ha. Anyway, that chair was an accident."
"You aimed it."
Muffler scratched his neck. "Tony asks about the shore path?"
"Tell him it was the boat guy. Tell him I bought the boat."
"Then buy the boat. Tony'll want to see it."
Alex sighed. "Fine. Buy the damn boat."