Max weighs his answer like a gambler calculating odds. “I’d have to say yes, that’s a lock.”
“Don’t you think you ought to warn her about that?”
“Nah. Jet’s a survivor, Goose. She doesn’t need to be told something like that. In case you haven’t noticed, she goes cold as an undertaker when she’s looking at a problem. You probably see her through rose-colored glasses. Always have, I guess. But she’s no Pollyanna.”
He’s right about that, though I don’t like to dwell on it.
“Max, nobody’s more of a survivor than you. Surely you know more about the crimes of the Poker Club than anyone but Claude Buckman. It would be nothing for you to set up a MAD situation with them.”
“Mad?” He looks confused for but a moment. “You mean mutual assured destruction?”
“Exactly. Make your own cache. Let your partners know that if they hurt you, they’ll all end up in prison. If you have to use your cache, you can cut a deal with the prosecutors.”
He laughs at my apparent naïveté. “That’s a nice idea, Goose. And if my partners were all old-timers like Buckman and Donnelly, I might try it. But you’re forgetting Russo and Cash. Russo’s brother’s a made guy. And Wyatt has six Special Forces operators on his payroll. You don’t threaten guys like that. They’d lock me in a deer freezer on Wyatt’s island and dissect me with a dull pocketknife. I figure it’d take ’em about an hour to find out where I hid whatever cache I’d created. They’ll do the same to whoever Sally left hers with, once they find out who it is.”
Max’s fear is contagious. “There’s been a rash of break-ins downtown. Lawyers’ offices. And Nadine Sullivan had her shop broken into. They cracked the safe there. Was that you, looking for this data cache Sally made?”
He’s no longer smiling. “Yeah, that was me. A guy I hired, anyway. But it wasn’t this cache I was looking for. I mean, I didn’t know last night that it existed.”
That’s one mystery solved, at least partly. “What do you mean? What were you looking for?”
“Somebody stole a couple of manila envelopes from my office. Dangerous information. I questioned Jet, and it wasn’t her. Sally denied it, too, but something told me it might be her, so I searched the house. Didn’t find anything. Then I made a list of lawyers she might have given the stuff to. I figured she might be planning to divorce me.”
Now I get it. “Why did you put Nadine on that list?”
“Because her mother and Sally had been so close.”
“What would you have done if it turned out Nadine had your stuff?”
Max’s motionless face tells me all I need to know. “She didn’t,” he says. “Let’s just leave it there.”
“Well, your guys broke into her house today. How about you put a stop to that? She doesn’t have anything.”
“Sure, no problem.”
Max’s willingness to kill over information that could hurt him reminds me that people in the normal world constantly underestimate the danger of poking into matters we don’t understand. You’d think a journalist would have learned that by now. Maybe the fact that I know all the players in this situation is what blinds me to the danger.
“So you just found out about this cache Sally put together?”
He nods. “Arthur Pine told me about it this morning, at the jail.”
“How did Arthur know about it?”
“Sally called Claude Buckman sometime last night, before killing herself. I don’t understand it, man. She must have hated me at the end. She wanted to destroy me.”
He’s sticking to the suicide story. “And it’s all Poker Club stuff?”
“Most of it involves the paper mill deal.”
“Did you screw Nadine’s mother, Max?”
He looks amused by the question. “Margaret? Every way you can think of, boy, plus ten more. Her husband ran out on her, so she needed it. She’d got tired of him even before he took off, though. He wasn’t up to her level. Margaret was smart as a whip, just like her daughter. I’d like to hit that once or twice. Just to see if the blood runs true.”
Seeing my face, Max guffaws, enjoying himself immensely. “Yeah, I saw Nadine drive up here and send Jet running. Where’s she hiding? Back bedroom? Should I pay her a visit? Is she decent? Or is she better than that?”
I come to my feet at this.
Max only laughs louder. “Take it easy, Goose. I’m not going back there. But somebody needs to break that girl