The fire popped and I winced. "You broke his arm?"

"He had a baseball bat. They didn't bother me much after that."

I checked out the bulging biceps underneath his T-shirt and wondered what had possessed anyone to come at him in the first place. "Is this job that important to you?"

His chair creaked ominously as he leaned back. "I worked on my pop's fishing boat when I was growing up, me and my brother both. Out in the morning when it was still dark, home after dark. Miserable, cold, and wet, and you worked all day long. Pop didn't pay us much, but he taught us one thing-someone pays you to do a job and you agree to do it, then you do it. That's it." He turned back to the fire. "We get good money and benefits for throwing bags a few hours a day and sitting around in the ready room watching TV the rest of the shift. On top of that, you and your whole family get to fly around basically for free. It's not like we're skilled labor. This is a good job for someone like me. It's how I'm going to put my kids through college, and nobody's going to run me off."

"You have a family?"

"I got a wife and two kids, three and seven."

"It sounds as if they tried to run you off and failed."

"I can take care of myself. But it's different when it's your family, and I'll tell you something else, Little Pete scares the shit out of me. There's something wrong in the head with that kid. He's okay when he's around Big Pete, but when he's not, it's like he goes crazy or something. And when he's drunk, forget about it. When he's sober you never know what he's going to do, and when he's tight it's getting so it's tough even for his pop to deal with him."

"Do you believe he could kill someone?"

The lines in his forehead deepened. "If Petey'd been one of the guys who jumped me that night in the parking lot, he wouldn't have run off. I can't watch Terry all the time and no offense to you, but I'm sure as hell not going to count on the company to protect him. The company's just as likely to cut a deal and bring Petey back to work."

I wanted to say that that would never happen. I wanted to assure him that once Lenny had all the details, as I had now, there would be no way we'd bring Little Pete back to work and no way Terry would be fired. I couldn't tell him that because I didn't know it. Lenny was still a mystery to me. "Tell your brother to sit tight while I figure out what to do. I'll find a way to work all this out."

"How?"

"I have no idea. And tell him thanks."

"I will."

I sat quietly while he found a poker and tried without success to get the fire going again. When he'd settled back in, I asked him if he wanted more coffee.

"I'm working a shift starts at four in the morning. I gotta get some sleep tonight."

That may have been a clue that he wanted to go home, but I liked sitting with him. In spite of how I felt about everything else, I felt safe with him, and that was something I hadn't felt for a while. "John, you said something outside about Ellen's death not being a suicide. Do you believe she was murdered?"

"I don't know." He said it in a way that made it clear we weren't going to talk about it that night, or maybe ever, and I had to respect that. I tried something easier.

"How did you hook up with Ellen?"

"I was trying to get my brother a job at the airport."

"That doesn't seem so hard."

"The union didn't want another one like me around, so they poisoned him with the supervisors. They said if Terry got hired, they'd slow down the operation, set something on fire. I told her about it, and she interviewed him personally and made them put him on. After that, I told her if she ever needed help to call me."

"And she did."

"Yeah."

"What about?"

He did yet another visual sweep of the restaurant, but no one we knew was there, including our waiter. "There was something she needed… this package."

I sat bolt upright, nearly tipping the table into his lap. "What kind of a package?"

"I don't know, about this big"-letter-sized-"a plain brown envelope with tape and dust all over it."

"What was in it?"

"She didn't say I should look in it, and she didn't open it in front of me, so I don't know what it was."

In this one case, I wished he'd been a tad less principled. I couldn't ask the questions fast enough. "Why did she need you to get it?"

"It was in the ceiling tiles in the men's locker room. Dickie must have tossed it up there sometime when he was working here."

"Dickie Flynn?"

"He's the one told her where it was."

"Why was it in the ceiling?"

"Guys use the ceiling for a hiding spot when they're in a hurry."

"Doesn't seem all that convenient."

"Say they're helping themselves to the catering cart, stealing minis. After cocktails, they don't want to walk around with empty bottles knocking around in their pockets, and they don't want to leave 'em lying around in trash cans, so they toss them up there. The ceiling has rattled around here for years, decades even."

"But no one ever came upon this package?"

"It was way off in the corner. You wouldn't find it unless you knew what you were looking for."

"That means it could have been up there for a while. And you can't even hazard a guess as to what this was about? She never said?"

"No, I don't know. But I think Angie might."

"Angie as in 'Angelo'?"

"Yeah. He had something she needed, and she wanted to put the squeeze on him."

"DiBiasi?" I had to pause for a moment and regroup. I had clearly hit the mother lode, and I was having a hard time assimilating all the new data. "I thought Angelo was small-time. An afterthought. Wrong place, wrong time, that whole story."

John shook his head. "Angelo was the target all along. That whole stakeout thing was just to make it look like they grabbed him up by accident. I gave her some help on the thing."

"Ellen set him up?"

"As far as I know, the whole thing was her idea."

"I'll be damned." I sat back and let this new information settle over everything else that we knew. It added whole dimensions to what I knew about Ellen. And it forced a new appreciation for how deep the swamp was getting. Packages, setups, stakeouts. Missing files, missing tapes, missing videos. Maybe a mystery lover. I didn't know if we'd ever find the bottom or what we'd find if we got there. What I did know was that I was following Ellen's tracks right into the depths.

"This Angelo thing," I asked, "was it before or after the package?"

"After."

"So he might be connected somehow to that envelope. Maybe that's why the union's pushing so hard to get him back," I said. "And Lenny, too, I suppose. They're trying to take away my leverage. I didn't even know I had leverage. John, I know you don't know what was in the package, but did Ellen ever say anything about the Beechcraft?"

He looked puzzled. "No. Not to me."

"How about fish?"

"Fish?" More puzzled still. "Like scrod?"

"I don't think so, but I don't know. Crescent Security?"

He shook his head.

"Ellen seemed to be working on something, collecting information. It may have something to do with the Majestic-Nor'easter merger or the Beechcraft. We were even thinking Little Pete might have been involved in drug running."

"No. That I would have heard about. Besides, Big Pete would kill Petey with his bare hands if he found out he was into drugs. He's already close to killing him over the booze."

"Does he really care about him as much as it seems?"

"Yeah, he cares about him, but part of it is he feels guilty, too, like he passed on the disease. Big Pete was a boozer himself until just a few years ago-the whole time Petey was growing up, anyway. He's always trying to get him to go to A.A. meetings with him. The kid won't go."

Big Pete's chewed-up fingernails started to make some sense. We sat for another few minutes in silence before he started fidgeting, making it clear he wanted to leave.