And Neal got a life.
“You’re what, twenty-eight?” Graham asked.
“Working for Friends counts like dog years,” Neal answered, “so I’m really one hundred and ninety-six.”
Friends was shorthand for Friends of the Family, banker Ethan Kitteredge’s private organization that helped his wealthier clients out of jams, which usually meant putting Neal and Graham smack in the middle of one. Neal had just gotten out of the last jam, and wasn’t eager to get into another.
Besides, I’m happy, Graham, Neal thought. I get up in the morning, fix Karen her lunch, then go to my desk and work on my Smollett thesis until about noon. Then I either make lunch or walk down to Brogan’s for a sandwich and a beer, then back to work until late afternoon, when I whip up dinner. Then Karen comes home and we eat, after which she usually grades homework. Then we might watch a little television before we go to bed. I like my life.
“I’m thinking about transferring my credits from Columbia,” Neal said, “and finishing my degree at Nevada.”
Finishing my degree: It had an unreal sound to it. He’d been trying to finish his master’s degree for about six years, but work for Friends had taken him on some major detours from his goal of one day teaching English at a little college somewhere.
“Have you been getting the checks?” Graham asked.
Neal nodded. A few weeks after he’d gone underground, a package arrived at the door with a complete set of ID for a young man named Thomas Heskins. A few days after that, the checks started to come in an amount roughly equal to Neal’s monthly salary as an operative for Friends of the Family.
Karen frowned at the mention of the checks, which were a touchy subject in the house. Neal made more money sitting around the house working on “Tobias Smollett: The Image of the Outsider in the Eighteenth-Century English Novel” than Karen made working fifty-plus hours each week teaching elementary school. In typical Neal Carey fashion, he had decided to write his master’s thesis before enrolling in a graduate program.
Karen Hawley loved Neal Carey deeply, but he did have a horse-and-cart problem. And now that she had a sabbatical semester, it was starting to become her horse-and-cart problem.
“The checks,” Graham said, “were not meant to be a pension. They were sort of disability payments while you had to hide out.”
Were? Neal thought. This didn’t sound good.
“What are you saying, Dad?” Neal asked.
“I’m saying you can be Neal Carey again if you want.”
Why would I want to do something like that? Neal thought.
“Who did you pay off?” Neal asked.
The “you” in this case being Kitteredge’s bank in Providence, Rhode Island.
“The usual,” Graham said. Washington politicians were about as hard to purchase as magazine subscriptions, although you did have to renew them more often. Besides, the feds didn’t have much of a hard-on for this case. If someone did them a favor by disposing of a dirtbag neo-Nazi like Strekker, well, it was one less dirtbag they had to worry about. Graham couldn’t prove that Neal had performed this particular service and they had never talked about it, but the last time Joe Graham had seen Neal Carey, he had been trotting out into the sagebrush with a rifle in his hands.
“Ed thinks it’s time you came back to work,” Graham said.
Ed was Ed Levine, manager of Friends’ New York office, where Graham worked and Neal usually didn’t.
“Who’s missing?” Neal sighed. “Who do you want me to find?”
Because that was mostly what he did for Friends.
Graham smiled his rat-sucking-on-garbage smile and said, “That’s the beauty part.”
“What’s the beauty part?” Neal asked. Giving in and asking was easier than letting Graham drag it out.
“You don’t have to find anybody,” Graham answered. “We already found her.”
“Sooo…?” Neal asked.
Graham grinned.
“We want you to teach her English.”
“Who? Why? Where’s she from?”
“Brooklyn,” Graham answered.
“Which leaves who and why,” Neal said.
“Are you taking the job?” asked Graham.
He wasn’t going to give up anything else unless Neal was on the job.
Uh-uh, thought Neal. I say yes and then you tell me you found her in some prison in Outer Mongolia and my job is to break in, teach her English, and escape on camelback across the Soviet Union.
“I’m retired,” Neal repeated.
“How much?” Karen asked Graham.
Neal raised his eyebrows at her.
“We’ve been talking about putting a deck on the back of the house,” she explained.
Neal turned to Graham. “What is she, a witness?”
“Maybe,” Graham answered.
“Maybe?”
Graham said, “It might depend on how good you do with her.”
“Who is she,” Neal asked, “Eliza Doolittle?”
Graham rubbed his artificial hand into his real palm. It was a habit he had when he got nervous or impatient.
“Are you on, or what?” Graham asked.
“Is this a mob thing?” Neal asked. Because mob witnesses were dangerous. People tended to get killed in their general vicinity. “You want me to clean up some mob bimbo who’s mad because Guido slapped her around, and now she wants to tell the world about his funny friends, right?”
“Nothing like that,” Graham promised.
“And where do I have to go?”
“That’s the next beauty part. You don’t even have to leave the house. We want to bring her here.”
“Here,” Neal echoed.
“Here?” Karen asked.
“Here,” Graham repeated.
Neal laughed and turned to Karen. “Now how much do you want the deck?”
Graham also turned to Karen and gave her his most obsequious smile. “We think you would be a major asset in the cleaning-up process.”
Karen poured Graham a fresh cup of coffee, sat down next to him, and put her arm around his shoulder.
“You know, Joe,” she said, “when I envision this deck, I see a cedar hot tub on it.”
Neal whooped with laughter.
“I like her,” Graham said. “She’s a vicious putz like you, but I like her.”
“There’s a lot to like,” Neal agreed. A lot to love, he thought.
Graham said, “Okay, we’re talking deck with Jacuzzi money.”
“That was easy. Who is this mystery witness?” Neal asked.
Graham paused dramatically. He chewed his last bite of toast twenty-eight times and announced, “Polly Paget.”
Karen’s big blue eyes got bigger.
“The whole country’s looking for Polly Paget,” Neal said. “I should have known you had her.”
Graham shrugged.
“Where is she?” Neal asked.
“Out in the car.”
“You left that woman sitting out in the car?!” Karen yelled. “What do you think she is, luggage?”
“She was asleep.”
Karen punched Graham in the shoulder and stormed out the kitchen door.
“Ouch,” Graham said, looking a little hurt.
