Mean Streak by Carolyn Wheat Read Free Book Online

grimaced and lowered my hand.
    Would Riordan have done the same—minus the leg waxing—if he’d hired a male lawyer? Looking at his razor-cut hair, well-groomed nails, and impeccable wardrobe, I knew the answer: He sure as hell would. And that, somehow, made it all right.
    Halfway through my first cup of the foamy, caffeine-laden brew, Matt began to talk about his father. I was so surprised, I put the cup down onto the saucer with an audible clatter and stared at my companion. He had never, but never, mentioned his parents or his childhood to me in all the years we’d been together.
    â€œWe were living in Hell’s Kitchen back then,” he said. “In those days, wives didn’t work unless their husbands were seriously deficient.”
    I nodded; my own mother hadn’t begun her career in real estate until both her children were in college.
    â€œSo we lived on my father’s bus-driver salary,” he went on. “Which meant we were just a little bit poorer than some of the other people on the block, a little richer than others. My father used to lay bets with the bartender at the Shannon Bar and Grill over on Tenth Avenue. Never won much. Hell, he never won a damned thing, which was why my mother used to cry when he’d come home with half his paycheck riding on some broken-down nag out at Aqueduct. He’d always tell her that one day his horse would come in, and when it did, we could move out of the neighborhood and go to the Bronx, where things were good.”
    I laughed aloud. The idea of the Bronx, the city’s most dangerous borough, being a good place to raise kids was a concept totally new to me.
    â€œHey, don’t laugh,” he protested, but the smile lines around his eyes forgave me. “In those days, moving to Parkchester was the best thing that could happen to an Irish family. My parents talked about the Bronx as if it were the Promised Land.”
    It came to me that the reason Matt was talking to me about his family was that I was now his lawyer. What he’d kept hidden from his sometime girlfriend could be spoken about with his legal representative. We were closer as lawyer and client than we’d ever been as lovers.
    â€œOne day it happened. The horse he’d bet on came in first. Forty to one odds. He’d put down a thousand bucks, more than he’d ever bet before. He said it was because he had a tip from the jockey’s second cousin’s best friend, but who cared how it happened? The really important thing was that he’d won, that he was going to get forty thousand dollars and we were going to move to the Bronx.”
    I happened to know Matt had never lived in the Bronx.
    â€œSomething went wrong,” I guessed. “What was it?”
    â€œThe bartender who took the bet worked for the Westies,” he said. “They were behind the whole betting operation. Not that we in the neighborhood ever called them Westies—that was a name the press made up. But forty thousand bucks was an amount they just couldn’t see paying off on. They welshed on the bet, and when my father went to the Shannon to collect, they beat him up. Badly. He was in the hospital two weeks, and when he came home, he couldn’t talk because his jaw was wired. The night he came home,” Matt went on, his own jaw clenching with remembered anger, “the very night, he had us pack up all our things and move out. We slunk out of the neighborhood like a bunch of thieves, as if he’d done something wrong. He didn’t have what it took to stand up to them.”
    â€œDidn’t he go to the police?” I asked. “Not about the bet,” I clarified. “I know the cops couldn’t have done anything to help him collect on an illegal bet. But beating someone up is a crime, right?”
    â€œThat’s the part I could never forget,” Matt said. His smooth-as-silk voice grew ragged as he finished the tale.