each summer, and I always associated it with the beginning of our vacations. We would sit at the same table every time, or as near as we could get to it. There would be a view over Route 1, and my father would order a rib steak as big as his head, with all the trimmings, while my mother tut-tutted good naturedly and fretted about his heart.
Frank had died back in 2004, and an investment firm now owned the Hilltop, but it was still a place where regular folk could go for a decent steak dinner without breaking the bank. I hadn’t been back there in about thirty years, not since my father took his own life. There was too much of him associated with it, but in recent times I had learned more about my father and the reasons for what he had done, and I had reached an accommodation with the past. It meant that places like the Hilltop were no longer tinged with the same sadness, and I was glad that it remained pretty much as I remembered it, with its illuminated sixty-foot Saguaro cactus outside, and its herd of fiberglass cows. I slipped the hostess ten bucks to give me my family’s old table to myself, and ordered the ribeye in memory of my father. The dinner salad was just a little smaller than before, but since the original salad would have fed a small family it meant that there was less to throw away. I drank a glass of wine, and watched the cars go by, and thought about Epstein, and Liat, and an airplane hidden by the woods.
And I thought about the Collector, because one matter had remained untouched upon between Epstein and me, although Louis had raised it before I left with Walter to catch my plane. What Louis suggested was that, if the Collector were in possession of a full or partial list of names, he would almost certainly begin targeting those on it. This begged the question: if my name was on it, would he then also choose to target me? For that reason alone it was necessary to arrange a meeting in Lynn with the lawyer Eldritch, to whom the Collector was linked in ways that I did not fully understand.
I finished dinner, skipped dessert for fear of busting my insides, and headed back to my motel room. I had just turned on the light when my cell phone rang. It was Walter Cole. Davis Tate, the toxic figure on talk radio whose name appeared on the lists, was dead. According to Walter, Tate had been shot in the head, but some knife wounds had been inflicted on him before he died. His wallet, containing his credit cards and 150 dollars in cash, was still in his jacket pocket, but his cell phone was missing and a tan line on his left wrist suggested that his killer might have taken his wristwatch. The theft of the wristwatch, which would later be revealed as a modestly expensive Tudor, puzzled the detectives investigating the killing. Why leave the money but take the watch? I could have told them why, and so could Walter, but we did not.
The man who killed Tate had magpie eyes.
The Collector had just added another trophy to his cabinet of curiosities.
Early the next morning, I drove to Lynn.
If the firm of Eldritch & Associates had been raking in big bucks in recent years, it hadn’t seen fit to pump them back into its offices. It continued to occupy the top two floors of a bleak edifice too dull to qualify as an eyesore but still sufficiently ugly to make the neighboring businesses look as though they would have upped foundations and moved if they could, and it wasn’t as if they were housed in architectural gems either. The unprepossessing exterior of Tulley’s bar, a prime example of fortress design, stood to the right of Eldritch’s building. On its left, a telecom store previously run by, and for, Cambodians had been replaced by a telecom store run by, and for, Pakistanis. Short of putting up a sign inviting the American wing of Al Qaeda in for coffee and cookies, it couldn’t have advertised itself more as a target for federal surveillance in the current mood of distrust between the US and Pakistan. Otherwise, this stretch of Lynn was still the same accumulation of gray-green condos, nail salons, and ethnic restaurants that I remembered from previous visits.
The gold lettering on