“It’s nice that Lance thinks that,” Rawls said, “but he don’t know everything.”

“Who knows everything?” Mack Morris observed.

There were affirmative grunts around the table. Then Rawls’s three cohorts began to grill Stone.

“How come you’re Dick’s first cousin and we never heard of you?” Harley Davis asked.

“There was a rift in the family,” Stone said. “I spent a summer up here when I was eighteen, and that was about the only contact we had with the Boston branch. I had a great-aunt who lived in New York. She was the only one who was friendly.”

“What was the cause of the rift?” Don Brown asked.

“My father left Yale to become a carpenter in New York. He was also a member of the Communist Party for a little while.” He watched the four men exchange glances.

“How little a while?” Harley asked.

“A couple of years. His family disowned him, and my mother’s family disowned her for marrying him.”

“She was a Stone?”

“Yes, Matilda.”

Don looked up from his sandwich. “She a painter?”

“Yes.”

“My wife was a painter; she thought your mother was the greatest artist since Rembrandt.”

“My father thought so, too.”

“Where’d you go to school?”

“New York public schools, then NYU, both undergraduate and law.”

“You ever run into Sam Bernard there?”

“He taught me constitutional law.”

Harley looked at Rawls. “I’m surprised Sam didn’t recruit him.”

“He tried, but Stone preferred the NYPD,” Rawls replied.

“That was dumb,” Harley said.

Stone couldn’t help laughing. “It was pretty good, actually, until I took a bullet in the knee.” That wasn’t all of it, but it was as much as he told people.

“I heard that wasn’t all of it,” Mack said.

Stone suppressed another laugh.

“We’re careful people,” Rawls said, “by nature and by training. We do our homework.”

“What did you hear?” Stone asked.

“I heard you were a pain in the ass to your superiors, particularly on that last homicide you worked, and they took advantage of your injury to bounce you.”

“That’s a fair description,” Stone said. “Did you also hear I was right about the homicide?”

“I heard you were a little right,” Mack replied, “but that your partner had to save your ass before it was over.”

“That’s fair, too, I guess,” Stone admitted.

Mack turned to Rawls. “I guess he’ll do,” he said.

Stone felt lucky: the approval of the yacht club, the golf club and the Old Farts, all in one day.

THAT NIGHT, he slept with Rawls’s shotgun on the floor next to his bed.

18

STONE WAS WORKING on Dick’s estate when the phone rang.

“Hello?”

“This is the Dark Harbor Shop. We have a package for you. Can you come pick it up?”