The House of Wolves (House of Wolves #1)(3)

“Whose?” Jack would ask. “Ronald Reagan’s?”

Now Jack Wolf turned his chair and put his feet up on the desk closest to him in what they called the bullpen. His managing editor, Megan Callahan, was standing next to him. The other top editors were in a circle in front of them.

“So what do we got?” Jack said.

The Metro editor raised a hand. Rob something. One more kid Jack had hired on the cheap.

“I might have something pretty fresh; check it out.” He handed his phone over to Megan Callahan, who looked down at it and said, “You have got to be shitting me.”

She turned back to Rob.

“Is that who I think it is?”

The kid nodded. “In the flesh.” He grinned. “So to speak.”

Megan said, “I didn’t know guys still wore tracksuits like those.”

“They’re like Lululemon for geezers.”

Megan handed Jack the phone. And smiled. On the screen, big as life, was the mayor of San Francisco, Charlie Spooner. Getting ready to step down next year because of term limits and well into his seventies now.

And here he was, big as life, coming out the front door of Precious Orchard massage parlor, on Geary Street.

Jack Wolf’s smile grew.

“God is good.”

“Isn’t the mayor your friend?” Megan said.

“Things change. And by the way, what’s that got to do with anything?”

“Seriously, what do we do with this?”

“What we do,” Jack said, “is put that picture on the front page, underneath type that will make people think the Russians just blew up the Bay Bridge.”

“Don’t you think you should at least run this by your father?”

“You’re right. I should.”

Jack pulled out his phone, punched out a number, waited, put the phone back in his pocket. Smile getting bigger by the moment.

“Oops. Straight to voice mail.”

He stood up now and said to the group, “And if I see this on Twitter before the story goes up on our site later, every one of you is fired. Understood?”

In six months, half the people in the room were going to be gone anyway during the next round of buyouts. Joe Wolf used to dread having to tell people they were being let go. Not his middle son.

“It’s still his paper,” Megan said.

“Not today,” Jack Wolf said.

Ten minutes later, Megan Callahan was bursting into his office. Behind her he could see everybody in the city room staring at the big television set near the bullpen.

“Your father died.”

She told him how and said, “I guess Charlie just got saved from death by front page.”

“Like hell he did,” Jack said.





Five



BECAUSE OF THE LOCATION where they’d found his boat and the time when his body ended up at Crissy Field East Beach, the assumption was that the tide had carried him in.

After a thorough search of The Sea Wolf, the police could find no signs of foul play and reported drowning as the official cause of death—even though the autopsy showed that Joe Wolf had died with a blood alcohol level almost twice the legal limit and suffered a massive heart attack sometime after he’d gone into the water.

We’d been informed by the lead detective, a guy named Ben Cantor, that the case was still very much open.

And that we’d all be hearing from him as he continued his investigation.

The manager of the St. Francis Yacht Club said that night when he’d yelled over and asked if he had any passengers with him, Joe Wolf clearly didn’t hear the question. As we all knew, it had been a long time since Dad could hear worth a damn.

“Go, Wolves!” was his answer.

It was the last anybody had heard from Joseph Thomas Wolf.

Now I was in his suite overlooking the fifty yard line at Wolves Stadium. Though calling it a suite didn’t do it justice and really never had. I’d always thought of it as one of the city’s great luxury apartments, with a football view instead of water and bridges and the little cable cars that my father liked to sing about when he had enough vodka in him, the ones going halfway to the stars.

It wasn’t a wake today. The memorial service would be held at the end of the week, the day before the Wolves’ next game. It was what had been billed as a “gathering” to celebrate Joe Wolf’s life, organized, mostly for show, by his second wife, Rachel, who’d been living apart from my father for months. The first Mrs. Joe Wolf, Elise, mother to my brothers and me, was also in attendance, keeping her usual healthy distance from the second Mrs. Wolf.

Joe Wolf had met Rachel, thirty years his junior, when she sold him the house he bought after he left my mother.

I thought both the house and Rachel had been impulse buys on his part.

“She ended up waiving her commission,” he told me after they had separated. “I should have paid it—might have saved me a boatload of money on the back end.”

My three brothers were involved in three different and intense conversations throughout the room. Danny, I saw, seemed surgically attached to the NFL commissioner. Jack Wolf was in a heavy exchange with the governor, who, I noted, was almost as pretty as Jack was.

My younger brother, Thomas, vice president of the Wolves and just back from his most recent trip to Cabo, was chatting up a female bartender, nonalcoholic beer in hand.