Robert B Parker - Spenser 30 - Back Story

by Back Story(lit)

  "Boss wanted you to see me shoot," he said.

  The bullet had torn the small brass shade apart, and it hung in twisted shards around the shattered lightbulb.

  "Don't feel bad," I said. "That's the way I shot while I was learning."

  The man let the gun hang by his right side. He was tall and languid, with longish blond hair, a deep tan, pale blue eyes, and a diamond stud in his left ear. He wore tan slacks, a double-breasted blue blazer, and a white shirt with a big collar that spilled out over his lapels. He had on light tan woven leather loafers and no socks. He smiled. It made his mouth thin and oddly turned the corners of his mouth down slightly. It was the kind of smile a shark would smile, if sharks smiled.

  "I asked around about you," he said. "Everyone told me you were a funny guy."

  I ducked my head modestly.

  "What I want to know is how funny you'll be when you got a gut full of lead."

  "A gut full of lead?" I said. "That's pathetic. Nobody talks like that anymore. A gut full of lead?"

  "I don't think you're a funny guy," the man said. "And my boss don't think so. You need to stay away from the Emily Gordon case."

  "You're not with the government, are you?" I said.

  He paid no attention to me. The man really didn't think I was funny. He didn't think I was anything. The gun at his side was a 9mm Browning. I owned one just like it. He brought it up slowly and held it at arm's length, pointing it at my forehead. The hammer was back from the previous shot. He wasn't smiling, but there was still something shark-like in his face.

  "You unnerstand what I tole you," he said.

  "I think so," I said. "Who's your boss?"

  He didn't say anything. The black bottomless barrel of the gun stared unwaveringly at my forehead.

  "Okay," I said. "Be that way."

  "I could do it now," he said.

  His breathing seemed shallow and fast.

  "You could, but you won't."

  I focused on his trigger finger. If it showed any sign of movement I would roll to my right behind my desk and go for my gun. Except I wouldn't get behind my desk. He'd blow my head open while I was still in my chair. We both knew that. But I focused anyway. It was better than wondering if there was an afterlife.

  "Why won't I?"

  "You're supposed to scare me," I said.

  "You scared?"

  "Sure," I said. "But a lot of people know I'm working on Emily Gordon. You kill me and it will make the case hot again. Your boss knows that."

  "Don't mean I won't kill you," he said.

  His eyes seemed wider and a little unfocused.

  "No, it don't," I said. "But it means you won't kill me now."

  "You keep pushing on the Gordon thing," the man said, "and we won't have no reason to wait."

  "Of course I might kill you," I said.

  He licked his lips and there were faint smudges of color over his cheekbones.

  "Pal," he said, "if there's a next time, you'll be dead before you see me."

  "Does it hurt when they pierce your ears?" I said.

  He stared at me over the gun.

  "You know, when they put that cute diamond in your ear, was it painful?"

  He stared at me some more.

  Then he said, "Fuck you, pal," and walked out, still holding the gun.

  20

  I sat with Hawk and Vinnie Morris on a bench in Quincy Market, where we could keep track of the young female tourists. We had coffee in big paper cups. Vinnie had a jelly donut. Hawk shook his head slowly.

  "Don't know anybody sounds like your man," he said. "Like the diamond earring, though. You sure he's white?"

  "Whiter than Christmas," I said. "Vinnie?" Vinnie leaned forward a little so he wouldn't get jelly on his shirt.

  "Vinnie," I said, "jelly donuts are the single uncoolest thing a man can eat."

  "I like them," Vinnie said.

  "Honkie soul food," Hawk said.

  "You know anybody sounds like the guy I described?" I said to Vinnie.

  "Yeah."

  "So why didn't you say so?"

  "I'm eating my donut," Vinnie said.

  I looked at Hawk. Hawk grinned.

  "Vinnie got a lotta focus," Hawk said.

  Vinnie finished his donut and drank some coffee. There was no sense of hurry, but all his movements were very quick. And exact. He patted his mouth with a paper napkin.

  "Sounds to me like a guy named Harvey," he said.

  "First name or last?"

  "Don't know. He's from Miami," Vinnie said. "Comes up here sometimes, does gun work for Sonny Karnofsky."

  "You know him?"

  "I met him."

  "How?"

  Vinnie looked at me.

  "I mean 'how?' in general," I said.

  "I'm still with Gino," Vinnie said. "Him and Sonny was doing something. Harvey was walking behind Sonny."

  "He any good?" I said.

  "Yes."

  "Better than you?" Hawk said.

  "No," Vinnie said.

  "As good as you?" I said.

  "No."

  Hawk grinned.

  "Anybody good as you?" he said.

  "Maybe that Mex from L.A."

  "Chollo," I said.

  "He's pretty good," Vinnie said.

  Hawk looked at me. "Sonny took over what Joe Broz left behind," Hawk said.

  "Which is pretty much everything," I said.

  "Except for Gino," Vinnie said.

  "And Tony Marcus," Hawk said.

  "Talk to me a little more about Harvey," I said.

  Vinnie watched a youngish woman walk by in shorts and a cropped tank top. "Fucking broads got no shame," Vinnie said.

  "It's one of the many things I like about them," Hawk said.

  "Talk about Harvey," I said.

  "He's good, but he's got no soul," Vinnie said. "He'll shoot anything."

  "He like it?" I said.

  "Yeah."

  "Could he be working for anybody else?" I said.

  "Up here? No. You work here for Sonny, you don't work for anybody else."

  "You ever work for Sonny?" I said to Hawk.

  "I don't like him," Hawk said.

  "Is that a no?"

  "It is."

  "So why is Sonny Karnofsky worried about a counterculture murder that went down twenty-eight years ago?" I said.

  "We criminals," Hawk said. "We don't know stuff like that."

  "I don't either," I said. "I guess I'll have to talk with Sonny."

  "That would suggest to him that you ain't leaving the case alone."

  "It would," I said.

  Hawk nodded. "I'll come along," he said.

  "When we going to do it," Vinnie said.

  "No reason to wait," I said.

  21

  Sonny Karnofsky practiced his profession out of the Pulaski Social Club, near the Charlestown line, a couple blocks into Somerville from Sullivan Square. It was a narrow three-decker with clapboard siding, faced on the first floor with rust-colored artificial stone. There was a large plate glass window to the right of the narrow entry door. Across the window, PULASKI SOCIAL CLUB was lettered in black. An unlaundered curtain hung across the inside of the window so you couldn't see in.

  Vinnie waited in the car at the curb. Hawk got out with me and leaned against the car while I got out and walked to the club. There were a couple guys hanging outside the doorway, smoking cigarettes and drinking beer from the bottle and looking dangerous in the way only bottom-rung wiseguys were able to look while they waited for someone to tell them to do something. I started in the door, and a fat guy with a lot of tattoos put his arm out. "You going somewhere?"

  "Am I going somewhere," I said. "I never think of saying stuff like that until it's too late. That's great: Are you going somewhere. Hot dog!"

  "What are you, a wiseguy?" the fat guy said.

  "I am," I said. "And I'm looking for Sonny Karnofsky."

  "Yeah?"

  "I'm here to talk with him
about Harvey."

  The fat guy was getting a little careful. Maybe I was important.

  "He know you're coming?"

  "Tell him I'm here," I said.

  The fat guy hesitated. He looked at Hawk leaning on the car. He looked at the other guy, much smaller, wearing a dirty tank top hanging outside pink Bermuda shorts, and black sandals.

  "Find out if Sonny wants to see this guy," the fat guy said.

  The guy in the sandals went inside. The fat man had dropped his arm, but stood with his body shielding the entrance. If I wasn't supposed to go in and he let me, Sonny would have his ass. If I was supposed to go in and he didn't let me, Sonny would have his ass. We waited. Hawk seemed to be enjoying it. Vinnie didn't seem to know it was happening. The other guy came back out.

  "Okay," he said to the fat guy.

  The fat guy turned to me.

  "Okay," he said.

  "I love a chain of command," I said.

  The fat guy jerked his head toward the door, and the guy in the sandals opened it for me and I went in. There was a big shabby open room with a table and an old refrigerator against the wall to my right. Four guys were playing cards. Two other guys were at another table, drinking beer and watching The Young and the Restless on television. A big poster of the New England Patriots Super Bowl team was taped to the wall to my left. And straight ahead, to the left of a half-open door, was a large calendar with the days crossed off.

  "Through that door in the back," the guy in the sandals told me.

  As I walked through the room, the men stared at me. Probably sick with envy. Through the open door was the quintessential back room: dirty brown walls, brown linoleum floor, dirty window covered with wire mesh that looked out at the back of the next building. Old oak desk, old oak file cabinet, old cane-back oak swivel chair behind the desk, big old sagging armchair covered in shabby brown corduroy. In the armchair, crossways, with his legs swung over one of the chair arms, sat my recent acquaintance Harvey, wearing a white linen suit. In the old swivel chair like an imposing toad, wearing a red-and-blue Hawaiian shirt that gapped between the buttons over his stomach, was Sonny Karnofsky.

  Sonny looked at me without expression. Harvey swung his leg sort of indolently and smirked a little. Sonny waited.

  "You know me?" I said.

  "Yeah."

  "Why'd you send this fop around to scare me to death."

  "What's a fop?" Sonny said.

  I pointed at Harvey. With his white suit, he was wearing a pale blue shirt and a white tie. Flawless.

  "What makes you think I sent him to do anything?"

  "Oh come on, Sonny," I said. "You think he felt like threatening somebody, and he picked me out of the phone book? What I want to know is why you care about the murder of some woman from California, happened twenty-eight years ago?"

  "Corkie says you got some people waiting for you outside," Sonny said.

  There was maybe the hint of an Eastern European accent in his speech, but it was so faint that maybe it wasn't there.

  "I do."

  Sonny nodded slowly. "Good idea," he said. His voice was thick, as if his pipes were clogged.

  "Were you a counterculture radical in 1974?" I said. He raised a hand and pointed at me with a forefinger so fat it made the skin taut.

  "Anybody knows me will tell you, you fuck with me and you're dead."

  "I've heard that," I said.

  "And they'll tell you, fuck with my family and you'll wish you fucked with me."

  "Family?"

  Sonny was so used to being king of the hill these days that he probably didn't watch what he said as much as he used to. His face was expressionless, but his mouth clamped hard shut. We looked at each other for a moment. Without taking his eyes off me, he spoke to Harvey.

  "Not here. But as quick as you can someplace else," Sonny said. "Kill him."

  Harvey looked like a guy with a low-grade fever.

  "Be my pleasure," Harvey said.

  That pretty well said it all, so I turned and marched out. I hate to be in a place where I'm not wanted.

  22

  Sitting in my office, Daryl was sort of hunched with her hands in her lap. "I never really think of it as lying," she said. I nodded. Nondirective.

  "It's. " she looked at Paul, who sat quietly next to her, even more nondirective, if possible, than I was. "It's more, like, how it should have been. You know? How it could have been, if my parents. " "Sure," I said. Paul and I looked supportively at Daryl. Daryl looked at her hands.

  "They embarrassed me," she said.

  "Your parents."

  "Yes."

  "Because?"

  "Because? Because they were fucking hippies, for God's sake. Were your parents hippies?"

  I thought of my father and my two uncles.

  "No," I said. "They weren't."

  "Most people's weren't. And even if they were, they got over it."

  "They were different times," I said, just to say something.

  "I'm lucky they didn't name me Moonflower."

  "You are," I said.

  Paul smiled. It was as if Daryl didn't hear me.

  "We didn't come here to visit my aunt," Daryl said. "We came here with some man my mother was fucking."

  Paul and I looked at each other. We were thinking of Paul's mother.

  I had swiveled my chair a little so I could see out my window. Although it was early afternoon, the sky outside my office was dark and getting darker. Rain was coming. Daryl sat without saying anything.

  "Your father know about this man?"

  "I don't know what he knew," Daryl said. "I think he was stoned for the first twelve years of my life."

  "Were they separated?" I said.

  She didn't answer for awhile. She had stopped looking at her lap and begun to look out through my window at the rain that hadn't come yet. I was about to ask again when she answered me.

  "Separated?" she laughed. "Hell, I don't know if they were even married. I mean, maybe some long-haired freak in a tie-dyed shirt mumbled something and smoked hemp with them. But separated? From what?"

  "Did your father know your mother, ah, fooled around?"

  "Oh, yes."

  "Did he object?"

  "Maybe when he wasn't stoned. But she didn't care. She wasn't going to be somebody's chattel."

  "Right on, sister," I said. "Your father fool around?"

  "I don't think so. I think he was in love with Mistress Bong."

  I could see why she had made up a story. Loosened, her rage was carnivorous.

  "The man's name?" I said. "The one she came to Boston with."

  "I don't know," Daryl said.

  "Did you meet him?"

  "Yes, but I don't know what his name was. I don't know anything about him. I hated him."

  "Can you describe him?"

  "No."

  I nodded.

  "When I was fifteen," Paul said, "my mother was bopping a guy named Stephen, with a ph. He was about six-one, slim, short hair, close-cropped beard, and mustache, always wore aviator glasses with pink lenses."

  "So you remember, and I don't," Daryl said.

  "I remember them all," Paul said. "Clearly."

  "Well, I don't," Daryl said.

  Neither of us said anything. Daryl looked out my window. The rain was just getting under way, a few spatters making isolated trickle paths down the pane.

  "He was a black man," she said.

  I waited.

  "Not too big. I think he was only a little taller than my mother. He had a big afro."

  "You remember his name?" I said.