AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“We’ll see.”
He set his mug next to mine and then sat back, bracing one hand across his other arm tightly like he was preparing for a collision.
“Like I told you before, I originally started working part time at the fund, learning the investment game,” he began. “But I was still a teenage shit, and when I was finished at MIT, part of me could never leave the old neighborhood behind. I don’t know why, maybe to prove something to myself, like that I hadn’t sold out my roots for a fancy degree or some bullshit like that. Like I told you before, I caught a lot of flak when I chose to stay with the Petersens. Maybe I was trying to make up for that. I don’t really know. Anyway, when I wasn’t at the fund, I was usually getting into trouble with my old friends.”
“What kind of trouble?”
My voice was calm, but a red flag was waving internally. Considering my dad’s struggles, I had no desire to come anywhere near Boston’s seedy underground or anyone else who did.
Brandon grimaced. “Fighting, mostly, and hustling billiards. Standard hooligan shit.”
The pool table in his house now made more sense. Although it was hardly used, the room was an open invitation to his old gang of friends who never accepted the offer.
“So, what happened next?” I asked.
Brandon rubbed his face as if he were in physical pain, but continued. “So that was my life: trading by day, hustling at night. I was kind of a wunderkind at the firm, and Stan, Miranda’s dad, liked me. Took me six months to double his personal holdings, so he didn’t give a shit that I showed up hungover half the time or in the same wrinkled suit as the day before. When my first year was up, he promoted me to vice president, and that’s when I met Miranda.”
They had met at a company mixer on Stan Keith’s estate in Chestnut Hill. All of the fund managers brought their families for the afternoon shindig, which would have been typically New England, right down to the white wine spritzers and croquet games for the kiddies. All the men wearing khaki pants and polo shirts; the women in shift dresses and pearls. And a twenty-one-year-old Brandon had shown up half-drunk in jeans, a t-shirt, and his Red Sox hat after a late night at the pool hall.
“Miranda thought I was some asshole on the catering staff, come late to the party, and started chewing me out for it.”
He smiled ruefully, looking over my shoulder at some invisible memory. I curled smaller into my chair and listened.
“She didn’t get along with her old man. They fought like crazy, and she was at that age when all she wanted was to piss him off just because she could. So, when I told her to fuck herself, she yanked me into the kitchen pantry and took me up on the offer. It wasn’t until she dragged me out to show her dad what she’d done that she found out I actually worked for the bastard and was one of his most valuable employees.”
I cringed, not wanting to imagine him with the angel-faced woman I’d seen today, but finding it all too easy. She was everything I wasn’t: willowy and lithe, skin like porcelain. Genteel. And very beautiful. In her early twenties, she must have been stunning. Just the idea was painful.
“But I was still a world enough away to be the bad boy she needed,” Brandon continued, pulling me from my thoughts. “I didn’t give a shit about anything in those days—not my life, not the world around me, and certainly not Stan Keith. So, Miranda and I served a mutual purpose for each other—she was a distraction for me, a way of showing Stan he didn’t own me, and I was a way of getting her father’s attention.”
“But she fell in love with you anyway?”
The words clipped at my heart as I said them, but I could see where the story was going. It was a damn Billy Joel song. Uptown girl falls in love with a downtown boy and tries to make him over. And, if his closet full of suits was any indication, she mostly succeeded.
Brandon nodded sadly. “Unfortunately, yes. And as fucked up as I was, Skylar, it felt really good to have someone like Miranda—someone who was beautiful, who came from a good family, a person of substance—love me. She knew where I was from, and she still loved me. Maybe she even loved mebecauseof where I was from.”
I could see it. I didn’t like it, but I could see it. Brandon had struggled all his life for approval, still so clearly yearned for the kind of unconditional love he should have gotten as a kid. I could completely understand how at twenty-one, he could have easily confused the way a girl made him feel about himself with genuine love for her. But was that my own assumptions talking? I didn’t really want to know the truth, but I had to ask.
“Did you love her back?” My voice was soft, with a slight waver.
“I wanted to.” His voice was low, his eyes full of pain. “Poor Miranda. Stan was the real genius. He knew I was no good from the get-go, but I wonder if that’s actually why he encouraged my relationship with his daughter. He knew I’d fuck up enough one day to the point I’d need him to get me out of trouble, indebting me and my talents to him for good. All he needed to do was wait.”
It didn’t take long. After dating Miranda for six months or so, trouble found him and his Dorchester crew when a billiards game went bad.
“We got cocky. I didn’t give a shit if we made money at that point—I was only doing it for kicks, you know? When we started to gain a rep, I was ready to bow out, but some of the guys depended on it, the ones who couldn’t hold down a job or who already had a record.”
One night Brandon and his friends were challenged by an unknown player named Ricky O’Neill, who showed up himself looking to hustle. When Brandon beat him, O’Neill lost his temper and pulled a knife. He left after the bar owner tossed them all out, but that wasn’t the end of it.
Brandon leaned forward over his knees. His South Boston accent thickened the longer he told his story. “Later that night, when we’re all hanging at Mickey and Doug’s place, there’s this knock at the front door. We all look at each other, knowing this ain’t good news since it’s fuckin’ three in the morning. We’re drunk, of course, and before we get our act together enough to duck out the back, the door busts open and O’Neill comes chargin’ in with five other guys, all of ’em Westies.”
Ricky ended up being a member of the now-defunct West End gang, the criminal group headed up by Whitney Bulgar in the eighties. They didn’t do much now, but there were a few remnants who acted as envoys from local Mafia and even some of the heads in New York.
I shivered, even though I wasn’t the one still soaking wet. “So, what happened?”
Brandon buried his face in his palms. “About what you’d expect. They had guns, we had a few too. They shot my friend John, but we got O’Neill before the cops showed up. Everyone bailed out the back.”
They had run away from the two dead bodies lying in the run-down apartment in Field’s Corner, but the cops had caught up with two of the men from O’Neill’s crew, and both of them had sang like canaries.
“Did...” I paused, almost afraid to ask. But I had to. “Did...you...kill—”
