The Best American Mystery Stories 2002

I called Andy Ravenant’s office with a couple of questions, but Andy wasn’t there and Max Quinn hadn’t clocked in at all. I wanted to talk to Max, not least to thank him, although I wanted my ducks in a row first because I wasn’t certain just where he stood. Then the receptionist put me on hold, and when the phone was picked up again, it was Kitty Dwyer on the line.

“How’d you make out?” she asked me.

I didn’t know that I was any more ready to talk to Kitty than Max, but you can’t script every encounter. “Well, there’s good news and bad news,” I told her, shifting mental gears. “I got my tail caught in a crack but maybe I pushed some buttons. I don’t know for sure. Max bailed me out of a jam anyway.”

“Max? How so?”

“One of those things,” I said. “You needed to be there.”

“You mean more background than you want to go into over the phone?”

“I mean I’m not ready to confide in you, frankly,” I said.

“Meet you for a drink after work?”

I hesitated and then took the plunge. “Sure,” I said.

“Sun’s already past the yard-arm,” Kitty said.

That was true. I hadn’t gotten back to town until three in the afternoon. “I think I take your meaning,” I told her.

“Let’s close up shop, then,” she said.

We met at a bar in the financial district, busy enough with suits stopping on their way home that we didn’t attract any attention and just loud enough for personal conversations not to be overheard. It was a good choice. Too many people think a meeting should be held in a deserted place; it’s actually the reverse. Kitty knew a crowd gave better cover, and the ambient noise made a wire unreliable.

“So?” she asked as we put our drinks on a corner table.

I shrugged. “You guys gave me the bait, and I took it,” I said. “I don’t know how deep Ravenant and Dwyer is in, but you’re in deep enough to be worried about it.”

She didn’t fence. “I don’t want to be disbarred,” she told me, “but I don’t want to put Andy in the hot seat.”

“Is it that narrow a choice?”

“Most of our choices come down to self-interest,” she said.

“That’s open to definition,” I said. “What about Max?”

“What about him?”

“How’d you recruit his services, for openers?”

“He came to us from the states. Max had good connections.”

“Inside, you mean.”

“He’s got a lot of markers to call in.”

“Cops and private dicks don’t get on that well as a rule,” I said. “Then again, a lot of private dicks used to be cops.”

“The old blue network,” she said.

“Did he leave the state police under a cloud?”

“How do you mean?”

“You know what I mean, Kitty,” I said. “Did he take early retirement? Was he being investigated by Internal Affairs? Did he cut corners? What?”

She rolled her eyes. “Max is sui generis,” she said. “He worked a lot of undercover, drug stings, bribery, payoffs, you name it. He made enemies. But he made good busts, arrests that stuck. Andy was a PD, remember, but he respected Max.”

I understood what she meant. A public defender would smell out a dirty cop. “Andy knew Max from before?” I asked her.

“Sure,” she said.

I was trying to make something compute and couldn’t do the math.

“What exactly is bothering you, Jack?” Kitty asked.

“Max steered me in the direction of the bikers, and then he was there to save my bacon when I ran into grief.”

She didn’t wonder what kind of grief I’d run into. “What’s the problem with that?” she asked. “He’s using you as a blind? We’re defending a couple of kids on a trafficking rap. If we can make a case for intimidation, witness tampering, the whole nine yards, maybe we can buy them a little less time. Max Quinn is just doing his job.”

“Who are you trying to convince?” I asked her. “This isn’t a summation in front of a jury.”

She hadn’t touched her drink. She fiddled with the stem of her glass.

“I don’t feature it, either,” she admitted.

“What’s his game, then?”

“Oh for Christ’s sake, Jack, stop jerking me around,” she said, fiercely. “You know goddamn well what he’s up to, and he doesn’t give a rat’s ass if he takes us down, too.”