Another guy shorter and a bit wider stood on the other side of the opening. He wore a gray suit. Both of them had on official security service sunglasses and little microphones in their lapels. I knew the rangy guy. His name was Clarke. He'd been in the Marshal Service. Now he worked for a big private security firm in town. When we sat down I shot at him with my forefinger. He nodded briefly.
'Why the bodyguards?' I said.
Gavin shook his head.
'You said you had a proposal,' Gavin said. 'You want to make it?'
He looked tired and the lines on either side of his mouth seemed deeper than I remembered. A waitress came and took our order.
'Actually it's more like a hypothesis,' I said. 'I wanted to share it with you. See what you thought.'
'I don't have time for hypotheses,' Gavin said. 'And I have a lot less for you.'
'I figure you and Sterling were in business together,' I said. 'With Haskell.'
'I don't much care what you figure,' Gavin said.
The waitress brought him a martini. I had a club soda. The martini looked good, but I had no time to take an afternoon nap.
'I figure that Sterling had money trouble. He'd run through his family, and friends, and so he did what he had done before when he was in trouble. He went to an ex-wife.'
Gavin sipped his martini and looked at the menu.
'And the ex-wife he went to was Carla Quagliozzi.'
Without looking up from the menu, Gavin said, 'So?'
'Carla didn't have money to give him, or if she did, she was too smart to give it to him. But she was by now your girlfriend and she sent him to you. I don't know, you can fill it in later. Maybe she saw a chance to turn a profit. Maybe she felt sorry for him. His ex-wives seem to. Whatever her reason, you saw something useful. You saw a way to launder money and maybe make a profit on it in the process.'
The waitress returned. Gavin ordered steak tips and another martini. I had a salad. A big lunch is nap city too. Gavin folded his menu, handed it to the waitress, leaned back in his chair, and looked straight at me.
'Why would I care about laundering cash?' he said.
'Because you're Haskell Wechsler's lawyer and he's in a cash business.'
'Everyone has the right to a lawyer,' Gavin said. 'I'm a member of the Massachusetts Bar.'
'Sure,' I said.
Gavin drank the rest of his martini. The security guys were being profoundly casual just outside the steak house. The waitress brought Gavin's new martini and he rescued the olive from the old one before she took the empty glass away. She looked at me. I shook my head. Gavin ate the olive he'd rescued and put the ornamental toothpick down on the bread dish and turned it carefully so that it was nicely centered on the curve of the rim. He studied it a moment, pushed it a millimeter closer to the rim, and then sat back again.
'How exactly did I pull this off?' Gavin said. 'This laundering deal with Sterling.'
'I'm not sure of the details, but the general outline is like this. You or Haskell would take some of Haskell's cash and use it to fund one of Sterling's promotions. Because it was a charitable enterprise which often received cash contributions, the large cash amounts never caused a ripple. Sterling was probably exempted. The event would transpire and one of the beneficiaries would be Civil Streets, which is a dummy company that you created with Carla's name on the door. Once the money was in Civil Street's account, Carla could write checks or transfer funds to anybody she wanted. Maybe you could too and it would go back to Haskell, or another dummy company you set up for him, and his money would be washed and show a little profit to boot.'
Gavin's steak sandwich arrived, nearly covered with a sumptuous mound of narrow French fries. The waitress seemed sort of contemptuous as she put my salad in front of me.
'So what went wrong?' Gavin said.
'I don't know,' I said. 'Maybe the sexual harassment lawsuit. It would call attention to Sterling and to Galapalooza. What I know about Sterling, he could screw up a stroll in the garden, so it may have been something else.
'Didn't Sterling invite you in?' Gavin said.
'Yes, that bothers me too,' I said. 'If he was involved in some kind of illegal activity, why ask a detective to look into his affairs?'
Gavin spread his hands as if to say, there you go.
'I'll have to splice the answer to that in later,' I said. 'But whatever his reasons, I was in, and either my being in, or the lawsuit, or whatever fast one Sterling had pulled, or all of the above convinced someone that action was needed. Someone, I'm guessing you, sent your old client Cony Brown over to talk to Sterling. And for reasons I haven't got yet, Sterling shot him and ran off. He took a blue computer disk with him. My guess is that the details of the money wash are on it. So he's out there like a loose cannon and you can't find him, and he has evidence that will sink you, and probably Haskell with you. And if you take Haskell down, you know that you're as good as dead. But as long as Sterling is running from the cops, he won't be talking to them. But Carla knows all this too, and she knows that Sterling is a loose cannon, and maybe the stress of it is getting to her and maybe the metal of her resolve is starting to fatigue.'
I paused for a moment to admire the felicity of my metaphor. Gavin was drinking his martini. He hadn't touched his lunch.
'So you killed her. It would shut her up and it would serve as a warning to Sterling, and to make sure he got the warning, you cut out her tongue.'
Gavin didn't say a word. Very slowly he put his martini glass down on the table, placing it carefully in the exact
