The Quiet Boy Read online

  The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  Copyright © 2021 by Ben H. Winters

  Cover design by Gregg Kulick

  Cover art: Getty Images

  Cover copyright © 2021 Hachette Book Group, Inc.

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  ISBN 978-0-316-42854-5

  E3-20210407-NF-DA-ORI

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Part One: The Keener Boy January 14, 2019

  November 12, 2008

  November 19, 2008

  January 15, 2019

  January 20, 2009

  February 18, 2009

  January 16, 2019

  March 10, 2009

  January 17, 2019

  May 7, 2009

  April 11, 2009

  June 19, 2009

  Part Two: NOBODY FEELS ANY PAIN November 8, 2009

  November 20, 2009

  January 21, 2019

  December 9, 2009

  January 22, 2019

  December 18, 2009

  January 25, 2019

  Part Three: Renzer’s Peak January 28, 2019

  January 5, 2010

  February 4, 2019

  April 5, 2010

  February 5, 2019

  April 9, 2010

  February 5, 2019

  April 8, 2010

  Part Four: The Night Man April 14, 2010

  February 8, 2019

  February 10, 2019

  April 15, 2010

  February 11, 2019

  April 16, 2009

  February 13, 2019

  Coda: Summer 2019 Chapter

  Acknowledgments

  Discover More

  About the Author

  Also by Ben H. Winters

  For Diana Winters,

  Andrew Winters,

  Sherman Winters,

  and Milton Winters, of blessed memory

  All my life’s beautiful lawyers

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  I’m gonna get myself in fighting trim

  Scope out every angle of unfair advantage.

  I’m gonna bribe the officials,

  I’m gonna kill all the judges.

  It’s gonna take you people years to recover from all of the damage.

  —The Mountain Goats, “Up the Wolves”

  Part One

  The Keener Boy

  January 14, 2019

  The phone was ringing at the Killer Greens, but what business was that of the Rabbi’s? His job was straight chopping. He didn’t cover front of house, never worked the cash register, had no involvement with the taking of orders. His business was what came across his cutting board and under his knife: transforming waxy, bulbous sweet potatoes into neat golden cubes; removing the bulky brain stems of broccoli and butchering the bushes down into bite-size hunks; dicing slender stalks of spring onion into the thin tokens that could be sprinkled into a soup or a salad.

  Two or three times hourly the Rabbi might venture from behind his station to bus detritus from one of the steel tables, clearing bamboo bowls and brown biodegradable napkins. On occasion, need arising, he’d take out the wet mop and dance it across a spill of juice or smoothie. Once a shift he was on the hook to swab out the gender-neutral restroom.

  But no, under the Rabbi’s mandate fell nothing forward facing. No customer service, no conversation. And no—thank you very much—no phone.

  It kept ringing, though.

  The Rabbi was vexed. He laid down his Santoku knife and looked around. Where was Sunny? Lawrence was working the register for the shift, so he should have been the one taking phone orders, but he’d left on one of his epic cigarette breaks, which meant answering the phone fell to the manager on duty.

  “Sunny?” the Rabbi called out, lining up the fat ends of four carrots. “Phone.”

  “Yeah, dude.” Sunny appeared from nowhere, slid in next to him with her elbows on the edge of his station. “I can hear.”

  The phone rang again, and she gave it the finger.

  “It’s 11:30. It’s gonna be a writers’ room with some big complicated order.” Sunny rolled her eyes, annoyed at the gall of it, bunch of jerks wanting to spend money at their location.

  The Rabbi frowned and bent to his chop as Sunny sidled away.

  This kind of casual disavowal of responsibility made him deeply uncomfortable. He liked it when people were appropriately committed. He liked regular order. The Rabbi was punctilious about his duties. He arrived on time and stayed until the store was closed, and he had finished tomorrow’s prep, and the last of the boards was cleaned and hung gleaming to dry. Never did he poach food from the edges of his cutting board—unlike, say, Lawrence, who was known to slip the occasional piece of ham into his mouth, so you’d find him smiling with cheeks puffed like a chipmunk.

  And, again, contra-Lawrence, the Rabbi took exactly the amount of off-clock time allotted to him, although his preference was to cluster his three fifteen-minute short breaks into a single long one, take it all in a forty-five-minute chunk at the end of his shift. Then he would leave work and run home, three and a half miles from Park La Brea to Koreatown: the Rabbi on the run, head down, no earbuds. The soles of his tennis shoes slapping the cracked LA sidewalks. Heart thumping, sweat breathing down his back. On his days off, he ran twice: six miles in the morning, four and a half in the afternoon.

  OK, this was—what the hell? The phone had started again.

  He set down his knife and stared at the store’s cheap plastic landline, where it sat like a fat black frog beside the cash register. It rang again.

  The Rabbi felt a low, quivery dread, which was something that happened sometimes.

  Sometimes at work; sometimes just, like, on the street. As if he had accidentally brushed through a curtain of shadow, or as if it had brushed through him.

  “Sunny? Are you getting the phone?”

  “Just ignore it, Rabbi,” she called. “Ignore it.”

  She wandered back over to him now, a white table-wiping rag slung over her shoulder. “How are you, by the way? You look super-hot. Did I tell you that, when you came in?”

  She had. Sunny, despite or because of the advent of #MeToo, was a frequent and enthusiastic sexual harasser, although only, it seemed to the Rabbi, of him specifically. She would sigh w
ith cartoon amorousness when he walked in at the beginning of his shift; she would sneak up behind him and squeeze his arms, a risky proposition when a person was engaged in careful slicing. His biceps (which along with his broad scrabbler’s chest and fucked-up right ear were a souvenir of his long-ago time as a middle and high school wrestler) were, per Sunny, “a national treasure.” She called him a piece of ass. She urged him to wear tighter pants. She insisted that it was why she had hired him.

  The phone had stopped again. The Rabbi looked at it. Maybe that was it. Maybe it was done.

  “Oh, hey, I meant to say—in re: our conversation yesterday, about the two of us potentially getting it on at some point?”

  Sunny tried to affect a serious whisper but couldn’t keep the laughter out of her voice. It had not been a conversation; more of a monologue. The Rabbi had listened, shaking his head and chopping, as he did now. “You should know that my dad’s a gun nut. A former Marine. He was—what’s it called? A SEAL.”

  “OK, Sunny.”

  “So I’m not saying no, I’m just saying: buyer beware.”

  The Rabbi happened to know, and did not think it was a particularly obscure piece of information, that the SEALs were Navy, not Marines. He also knew it wouldn’t matter: called out on her bullshit, Sunny would wink and shrug. The Rabbi wiped down his board with a paper towel, opened a plastic bag full of lumpy beets, and got to business.

  The Rabbi actually liked Sunny quite a lot, which was remarkable given how few people he liked at all. All of the you look hot business was just teasing, of course—he knew exactly what he looked like—as was the nickname, which she had bequeathed to him in October of 2016, five months after he started working there. He had requested a particular Wednesday as a personal day, and Sunny, grilling him relentlessly over what kind of personal day (“A chick personal day? A dude? One of each?”), had at last elicited the information that he would be fasting for Yom Kippur.

  “What?” Sunny had yawped, bringing her hands up to her mouth, gasping, astonished. “You’re fucking shitting me!”

  The combined facts of his being both Jewish and Asian had struck Sunny as somehow fascinating and hilarious. This despite the fact that she herself, like most of the people who worked with him at Killer Greens, and like seemingly everybody in Fairfax–La Brea, was mixed in some complicated way. Sunny’s dad was half-Black and half-Latin, her mom half-white and half-Laotian. “Which makes me”—she liked to say, laughing, pretending to do the math—“fucking gorgeous.”

  Now the door made its cheerful little chime, and Sunny said, “Look alive, Rabbi. She’s here.”

  “Who?” he said, but he knew. He looked up, too quick, and Sunny snorted and shook her head with pursed lips.

  “Damn, son, you’re making me jealous. I swear to God.”

  “Shut up, Sunny.”

  He made a final, decisive chop and flipped his board, now dyed murder-scene red by the beets, into the sudsy water of the wash sink. The girl Sunny had pointed out was one of the many young and good-looking women who frequented the half a dozen exercise studios that lined the surrounding blocks. Pilates, Spinning, various kinds of bespoke “boot camps.” All the customers and instructors equally stunning and fit. The girl now airily examining the specials board was a waiflike woman with hair so blond it was nearly transparent; today she wore brightly pinkish orange athleisure pants, her small breasts in a red sports bra under some sort of flimsy breathable top.

  She sighed at the specials and brushed her hair back with a thin finger, let her gaze move past the unmanned register to the prep area behind the row of salads, and you could almost imagine, if you really wanted to work at it, that she was, indeed, looking at the Rabbi with some sort of interest.

  “Dude.” Sunny, who should have been at the front, leaned in to the Rabbi’s ear, murmuring solemnly. “She wants in. To your pants, I mean. Or into your robes, I guess. Not pants. Wait—what do Rabbis wear, actually?”

  “Sunny. Stop.”

  “Go take her order.” She said it dirty, like a command: “Take it.”

  “No.” The Rabbi pulled down a fresh cutting board, wiped his Santoku with a rag. “No.”

  His job was straight chopping. He did not cover front of house.

  He lined up a row of celery stalks. He cut them furiously.

  “Rabbi. Dude.” Sunny pointed. The woman was waiting. “I’m serious. Take her order.”

  “No. Sunny. Stop.”

  The phone rang again, and the Rabbi jumped and the Santoku slipped and cut off the finest tip of the index finger of his left hand.

  “Fuck,” he shouted.

  The exercise girl took a frightened half step backward from the cash register, and Sunny clapped one hand to her mouth and her eyes went wide at the blood, and then Lawrence, finally returned from his smoke break, got the phone—“Killer Greens?”—and then said “Hold on” and called over, his voice rich with incredulity.

  “Hey, Rabbi. It’s for you.”

  “What?”

  He walked to the front and took the receiver. He hadn’t wrapped anything around his finger. Blood ran freely in a steady drip from the cut.

  A man’s voice on the other end: “Ruben? Honey?”

  The Rabbi had to close his eyes.

  That voice, sweet and cunning. That old trickster’s wheedle.

  It was him, it was his father, the old god of his youth.

  November 12, 2008

  1.

  The cherry-red flip phone was not his normal phone, it was a special phone, and so the very instant it rang, Jay Shenk answered it, snapping it open and holding it to his lips and singing out, high and hopeful.

  “Helloooooo?” he called. “Hello?”

  “You’re gonna love me so much today, Brother Shenk,” said the gruff voice of the only man who had this number.

  At the sound of Malloy the Boy on the line, Shenk’s whole body brightened. His skin prickled and sparked. His spirit beamed and reached up toward heaven.

  He pumped his fist and ran faster.

  Jay Albert Shenk, attorney-at-law, was running on the treadmill in his office, doing a nice steady six miles an hour, looking out onto the intersection of Overland and Palms, and he had his cell phone connected up so he could talk via the little speaker built into the dashboard of the treadmill. Shenk was jogging in an undershirt and track shorts, and there was sweat on his temples and his ponytail was bobbing pleasingly against the nape of his neck, and he was working his five-pound arm weights too, up and down, up and down, and through the office window he was catching the sweet breeze wafting up from Gloria’s Glorious Donuts just downstairs, and he was watching a foxy young mom navigate her stroller around a hobo who’d colonized the patch of sidewalk right up to the curb line, and he was just generally reveling in the scruffy workaday glamour of West Los Angeles while he listened to Malloy the Boy’s basso rumbling out good news.

  “You’re just gonna love me to fucking bits,” said the Boy, and Shenk laughed.

  He already did—there was no denying it—Shenk had loved his man Malloy forever. His affection for Malloy the Boy, the most reliable of his various intelligence agents, was like a wide blue rush, borne before the tides, river-wide and river-strong. Jay turned one of his arm weights sideways and used the fat end to hit STOP on the treadmill, and then he rolled off backward and surfed the momentum over to his desk.

  “Ready, brother,” he said, and leaned forward, dripping sweat on a fresh legal pad, clicking open a ballpoint, clickity-click-click. “What’ve we got?”

  “Wounded bird,” rumbled Bobby, and Shenk’s body tightened with anticipation. His eyes glowed.

  “Sad,” he said.

  “Always,” said Bobby. “But unless I’m way off, Jay, this one’s a real humdinger.”

  Bobby’s voice was low and conspiratorial, like a sexy midnight disc jockey. Jay could picture the man, a goateed male nurse, a burly white guy somewhere north of six foot seven, crouched in a storage closet at the Pasade
na hospital where he worked. All 300-plus pounds of Bobby, in his pale green scrubs, with his gleaming bald head and pirate earrings, big Bobby crowded in with the folded sheets and the blood pressure cuffs, the ID bracelets and syringes and gowns.

  Bobby sat at the center of a statewide web of nurses and nurse’s assistants and orderlies, many or most of them small, efficient Filipino ladies who paid keen attention to their bustling wards, who were simultaneously supremely competent at the work itself and smart enough to read between the lines of the charts, to see with a single sidelong glance the invisible dollar signs imprinted thereupon, and who knew right away when to slip into a stairwell and fire off a text to their friend and patron, Bobby the Boy Malloy—who would in turn call it in to Shenk & Partners, the little law office that could.

  Jay took copious notes on this new humdinger, filling page after page of the legal pad with his florid hand. Bobby didn’t have a lot by way of details. It was all piecemeal, all coming through filtered, from Bobby’s nurse to Bobby to Shenk, but the nitty-gritty wasn’t Bobby’s part of the job. All the careful collection of facts, the arrangement of those scattered stars into a constellation of meaning, which could then be translated into the threat or the reality of legal action—all of that would come later. All of that was Shenk’s job.

  Sweat was drying on Jay’s chest and at the small of his back. Out the window, a guy in a Dodgers cap hustled out of Gloria’s Glorious, clutching the top of a paper bag, lust in his heart.

  “OK, Bobby! OK! That’s wild.” Shenk studied the notes. Wild. “And we’re pretty confident of the sourcing on this?”

  “Damn right we are,” said Malloy, his tone slightly affronted. “This is from Rosa. Rosa knows her stuff.”

  “Of course, of course,” Shenk said. “Just making sure. You know me. I’ve met Rosa, haven’t I? From the fractured pelvis? In Dana Point?”

  “No, Jay. That was Marina.”