Chapter 10

Dinner with the Conroys was the start of a roller-coaster ride that lasted a few months instead of a few minutes. As with the amusement park ride, I was left disappointed when the ride was over.

I guess the analogy is pretty close, now that I think about it.

We started out slowly. We ate dinner together and spend time doing things a normal couple would. He went to movies and the theatre; we took Lila to places that we all enjoyed; we spent quiet evenings at home.

Janet rotated departments — and shifts — during the second month of our relationship. She went from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m., Monday through Friday to 8 p.m. to 8 a.m. on a varying set of days.

Lila became my houseguest during her mother's work days. She was old enough to tend to herself but neither Janet nor I felt comfortable leaving her alone overnight — especially not several times per week.

It was nice having Lila at the house. She and I got along very well. I was respectful of her need to be a teenager — and a young adult. She was respectful that for many years I had lived by myself and I had a few idiosyncratic tendencies.

I have to admit, it was fun having her around — most of the time.

Janet joined her as my guest a few nights, too. It was nice having her around, too.

But, as Amelia had warned, there are portions of my life that are not for everyone. After the reappearance — and the arrest — of Tony Federici, my professional life returned to its pre-Janet lull.

The only problem was that I could never convince Janet of that. If I were 25 minutes late coming home, she thought I was out killing a family of five. If I had to cancel plans we had, she believed that I was out shaking down a convent.

Honestly, I think she watched too much television.

Certainly there were matters that required my attention. But they were few and far between and I'm almost positive that they never affected — or altered — the time I spent with her. Delays were mostly of the mundane nature. The sort any businessman with a host of interests might face during his daily routine.

Janet's inclusion into my life brought another problem — one I hadn't foreseen.

My increased visibility brought me to the attention of federal law enforcement officials. For the first few years after my return to the city I was content to come home for a quiet evening almost every night. I was anonymous, faceless.

Sure, the local Organized Crime Task Force — under the helm of Det. Susan Kay — was aware of my existence. Det. Kay and I had a cordial working relationship. As I have said, I kept the mayhem to a minimum and I was working diligently to remove the stigma left by my father that had attached itself to my operations.

Det. Kay understood what I was trying to do — and why I was trying to do it. Alas, not everyone was so enlightened.

The RICO boys (that's the federal racketeering statute that the FBI uses an umbrella to chase guys like me) took a renewed interest in the McPherson family. After my father's disappearance, I think they assumed the family would fall into disrepair and eventually dry up and blow away.

When I reworked the company into something stronger — and quasi-legal — it caught them by surprise. Law enforcement officials do not like being surprised.

The fact that all their digging brought them no information left them frustrated. Law enforcement officials do not like being frustrated.

Surprised and frustrated federal cops tend to do illogical things under the guise of protecting the masses. Their renewed interest in the McPherson family was one such instance.

The LEOs failed to recognize that organized crime is considerably better than disorganized crime. They labor under the premise that disrupting my business was good for society as a whole. They refuse to understand that crime is not going away. To paraphrase Salinger, if you took the rest of your life you could not identify one-tenth of the criminals in the United States.

The fact that I was now out and about on occasion — doing similar things probably as the cops were doing with their girlfriends — brought me back on their radar. Ironically, it was Det. Kay who alerted me to this when she called to ask for a sit-down meeting at her office.

Again, I assumed that my father's remains or perhaps Leo's had popped up. Or even that Tony Federici's song and dance had caught someone's ears. Instead, it was a simple fact-finding tour for Det. Kay.

"Are you up to something I should know about?" she asked me when we sat down in a private room.

"I have a girlfriend," I said with smile. "So that means we can't date. Other than that..."

I shrugged.

"Tony Federici tried to cut a deal by implicating you in his parents' deaths," she informed me. "If you did have anything to do with it, you did good work."

"If anyone killed those two it was Tony," I stated firmly.

"He claims he was locked up in your dungeon at the time," she said with a laugh. "Do you really have a dungeon?"

"Dungeon is so clichéd," I joked. "We prefer the term re-education facility. You know, like the 'internment camps' of World War II."

"Nice euphemism," she said. "Just a child molester is now called a child sex offender. It makes it sound so much nicer."

"You're not buying that crap Federici is spewing are you?" I asked. "I heard he crashed a car, killed a couple of his friends."

"You heard right," she said. "That's not why you're here."

"Then exactly why am I here?" I asked. "Detective, you know what I'm trying to do. I can't make it go away so I'm trying to limit the damage as much as possible."

She held up her hands.

"Something has the high-ups buzzing," she said. "I'm not sure what it is. Listen, Michael, I dealt with your old man and the guys who ran things in his stead. I also firmly suspect that your father is not returning — even if he is capable of returning, which I doubt. Sorry, but it is no great loss."

"I don't even know where my father is," I stated with conviction. "I have not heard a word from him in more than 18 months."

"I believe you," she told me. "That's not why you're here either. Listen, we're not friends. I know that. We're not confidantes. I know that, too. But if you're into something, don't make me hear about it from somewhere else. You were upfront with me about the way you planned to handle your family's assets. I appreciate that and it has made things easier for me. But I've been fielding an awful lot of questions about your activities."

"Define activities," I said. "Listen, Detective, just be straight with me. I don't think I've ever lied to you. At least I have tried not to. I may not have answered the question in the manner you hoped, but I have tried to avoid an outright falsehood. I hope that means something to you."

Again, Susan Kay raised her hands.

"It does," she insisted. "OK, I'll just ask what I want to know. Does the fact you've been more visible in the past couple of months mean you're planning on expanding your operations?"

I laughed.

"No," I said. "I can state firmly and for the record that I have no interest whatsoever in expanding my operations in any fashion that is against the statutes drafted by local, state or federal officials."

Det. Kay looked at me closely.

"What does that mean?" she asked eventually.

"It means that I do plan to grow operations," I said. "But the operations I plan to grow will not put me in conflict with you or your job. Look, you saw what happened when I quickly downsized certain cottage industries that my family had interest in."

Susan Kay knew what I was saying without explanation.

"It was chaos," I continued. "I am slowly shrinking the breadth and scope of several facets of my family's holdings. To shrink them quickly would create the same results that we have already seen. But I am increasing my investments into small business ventures and real estate holdings. I pay market prices and I charge the Federal Reserve prime lending rate for interest on the loans I make.

"Truly, I would like nothing more than to rid myself of some of the assets I inherited. They are cost-prohibitive given the amount of time and energy I have to put forth for them. But I think you know what would ensue: a full-scale street war to claim what I leave. I believe it would be larger and bloodier than what happened two years ago. The assets that remain have a higher potential yield with less potential danger than those I divested of then.

"You wouldn't get some low-level asshole running the show. You would wind up with somebody big — someone who does business like my father did. Do you want that? Does that serve anyone's purpose?"

Susan Kay watched me during my monolog.

"I don't want that," she told me. "As for serving anyone's purpose, there are people who justify their existence by going after men like your father. There are those ideologues who believe fervently that if you are out of the picture, the scene ends. We both know that's not true. Their father thought the same thing about your father. Their grandfather thought the same thing about your grandfather. The fact that things have changed for the better here doesn't keep them from thinking that you're a cancer."

"Fine," I said. "I'll start divesting myself off anything that I feel uncomfortable with. The special-agents-in-charge can deal with the fallout. You and your task force can spend the next 10 years cleaning up bodies and dodging bullets. Because you know that cops aren't exempt to a bunch of these folks. If they have to take out an FBI agent — or a detective second grade — to earn their stripes, don't think they won't."

I saw Det. Kay's hackles rise.

"Do you think I'm kidding?" I asked. "Think again. And pass that little snippet of information along to those bastards who are making inquiries. This isn't some sort of game for the type people who generally run these things. Your life is of no value to these people. The only thing they care about is power and money."

"What about you?" she shot back. "Like you give a crap if I live or die."

I shrugged.

"Believe it or not, I want no harm to come to you," I said evenly. "And I would do anything in my power to ensure it doesn't. I've treated you with respect and I've treated your department with respect."