Now and Then

He got the onion just where he wanted it in his glass and sipped a little of the drink.

“The bothersome thing,” he said, “is that the only activity in the account is at the end of each month, when his paycheck from Concord gets automatically deposited.”

“How long?”

“Account was opened with a thousand dollars two years ago,”

Epstein said. “He has not withdrawn anything, which is why it’s up to a hundred and forty thousand.”

“So what’s he live on?”

Epstein shook his head.

“Speaker’s fees?” I said.

“Most of those gigs are free,” Epstein said. “Very few pay much.”

“And he’s got an expensive condo, and a nice car, and he employs a driver.”

“So where’s it come from?” Epstein said.

“Is that a rhetorical question?”

“Sadly, so far,” Epstein said, “no.”

“I have a theory,” I said. “But first let me give you what I know.”

“I like a case when people start saying know instead of think, ”

Epstein said.

He gestured for another drink. The bartender brought it and looked at me. I shook my head. I didn’t mind getting drunk with Susan, but I didn’t want to show up that way. Epstein poured his still uneaten onion into the new drink and the bartender took away the empty glass.

“His name isn’t, or wasn’t, Perry Alderson,” I said. “It was Bradley Turner.”

“That his original name?” Epstein said.

“Don’t know,” I said. “Probably.”

“Probably is better than maybe, ” Epstein said. “Where’d he get the name, obit notice?”

“Better than that,” I said. “He killed the original Perry Alderson.”

Epstein drank some of his Gibson.

“Just to steal the name?” he said.

“No, it was involved with killing his own wife, the late Anne Marie Turner.”

“You prove any of this?” Epstein said.

“You will,” I said. “I’ll give you enough stuff to investigate. It’ll be only a matter of time.”

Epstein turned in his stool so that his back was against the bar. He held his Gibson in both hands in front of him.

“Go,” he said.

I gave him everything I had, except the part about Alderson having mental sex with Susan. It took a while, and Epstein didn’t interrupt me once. He sipped his drink carefully. Otherwise he just sat and listened and didn’t move. As I talked, the bar began to fill. Men in suits, mostly. A lot of them pols down from the state house, just across the Common. When I fi nished, Epstein took a last drink from his Gibson, and held it in his mouth for a moment before swallowing. Then he tipped the glass up and his head back, and got the two onions, which he chewed and swallowed.

“So he’s old enough in fact,” Epstein said when the onions were gone, “to have been in all that counterculture boogaloo that he claims.”

“Probably,” I said.

“It’s an area the bureau covered exhaustively,” Epstein said.

“Because they were such a threat to national security,”

I said.

“You know it,” Epstein said. “They were giving aid and comfort, for God’s sake, to our enemies.”

“Who were?”

Epstein grinned.

“I forget,” he said.

“I think it was the commies,” I said.

“Oh, yeah,” Epstein said. “Them.”

“Eternal vigilance,” I said.

“Sure,” Epstein said. “Anyway, if he ain’t in our files, he didn’t exist in the sixties. Can you write down names and places and dates?”