Blue Screen

by Robert B. Parker

  He said it again. “I know women.”

  “You know whores,” Sol said.

  Gerard grinned at me.

  “Same thing,” he said.

  “So you decided to, ah, represent them?”

  “Yeah.”

  “And you married Erin?” I said.

  “Wasn’t part of the plan, but…” Gerard spread his hands and shrugged. “I got her clothes and makeup and hair and took her places and taught her how to order. Got her a trainer. Hell, I even sent her to college. I mean, she was turning into something.”

  “And Misty?”

  “The little sister? She trailed along. Everywhere Erin went, there was little sister.”

  “And, I don’t mean to be indelicate, Mr. Basgall, but did you have a relationship with Misty?”

  “Relationship?” Gerard said and smiled. “What kinda relationship did you have in mind?”

  “Did you fuck her?”

  “Whoa, Sunny, pretty direct.”

  “Did you?”

  “Sure,” Gerard said, “I gave her a few pops. But I didn’t love her.”

  “You loved her sister.”

  “Like I said—did, still do.”

  We talked some more, but there was nothing else to learn from Gerard.

  21

  ON THE DRIVE back downtown, Sol said, “It might have gone better if I didn’t ride Gerard like I did.”

  “I don’t think it made any difference,” I said.

  “I know better. In that kind of situation you don’t get anywhere antagonizing the subject.”

  “Gerard was going to tell us what he told us and nothing more,” I said.

  Sol nodded.

  “Probably right,” he said.

  “You know him before?” I said.

  “I used to work vice,” Sol said. “I know about Gerard.”

  “Tell me,” I said.

  “He turned up in the early nineties—I’m sure he was pimping for a long time before he jumped onto our screen—he was running a high-class call-girl operation on the west side. Girls were all well-spoken, good-looking, well-dressed. No shortage of those out here. He’d find the ones that looked right and clean them up and train them and send them out to only the best clients.”

  “No shortage of them out here, either,” I said.

  Sol nodded.

  “Lotta money out here,” Sol said. “Not many scruples.”

  “Nor brains,” I said. “How did he do business. How did he connect the john with the hooker?”

  “Mostly hotel staff. Lot of high rollers in a lot of expensive hotels around the west side,” Sol said. “He’d have a doorman or a bellman or a bartender on commission, occasionally a concierge. He had a lot of limo drivers on the payroll, too.”

  “No cabbies,” I said.

  “No. He wasn’t interested in johns that took cabs.”

  “Nice little synergy,” I said. “The best clientele would attract the best girls, and the best girls would attract the best clientele.”

  “As long as you kept the discipline,” Sol said. “No blow jobs in cars, no stag shows at bachelor parties, no dirty movies—even if it was quick and easy money. Girl broke the rules, she got beat up and fired.”

  “Gerard do the beating up?” I said.

  “Sure, early years. Now he has employees.”

  “He’s got a number of arrests for assault.”

  “Gerard’s a tough guy,” Sol said. “But a lot of the assault busts are in the early years when he was just a street pimp protecting his investment. Beat up a few johns who got out of line with the whores. No jail time.”

  “So why do you suppose the OC squad is interested in him now?”

  “He’s spreading out,” Sol said. “He runs the upscale call-girl business on the west side and in the Valley. He’s spreading into Ventura County. He’s also, they tell me, trying to expand, maybe spread the whore business, maybe diversify—drugs, gambling. Nobody knows for sure. What they know is he’s got a connection now with a guy named del Rio, who sort of runs things around here.”

  “Should I talk to this del Rio person?” I said.

  “No.”

  “No?” I said. “Just like that?”

  “Reason number one,” Sol said. “You annoy him and I can’t protect you; for crissake, Cronjager can’t protect you. Reason number two, your vic got her neck snapped. Three thousand miles away. It’s not his style. He had to have her killed for some reason it would be neat, one bullet in the brain, and no trace of anyone or anything. Mr. del Rio is a dead end, any way you approach it.”

  “Maybe he could tell me a little more about Gerard,” I said.

  Sol smiled at me.

  “You can’t get to see him,” Sol said. “If you could, he wouldn’t tell you anything. If he did, it wouldn’t be true. Forget del Rio.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  “Besides,” Sol said. “Sooner or later Gerard is going to annoy del Rio. He’s too restless, too ambitious. He’ll do something he shouldn’t have, and he’ll be dead.”

  “Like that,” I said.

  “Like that.”

  We were quiet for a while.

  “You know what doesn’t quite work with Gerard?” I said.

  “All that chop chop about how he still loves her,” Sol said.

  “Maybe it’s true,” I said.

  “And maybe it don’t rain in Indianapolis,” Sol said. “In the summertime.”

  “So why would he keep saying it?” I said. “It doesn’t fit with the rest of him, you know, whore and woman are two words for the same thing? I loved her but I banged her sister? That Gerard makes sense. But to admit he still loves a woman who dumped him for another guy?”

  “Sympathy?” Sol said.

  “From us? He knows better. And even if he didn’t, he doesn’t care about us.”

  Sol nodded.

  “I know,” he said.

  “And the picture?”

  “He coulda put it there before he let us in,” Sol said.

  “But why would he?”

  “Don’t know,” Sol said. “What I know is that slime-bag motherfucker couldn’t love anybody.”

  I looked at Sol.

  “Is there something personal?” I said.

  “Yes.”

  “Is it my business?” I said.

  “No.”

  I smiled and shook my head. We were nearly downtown now.

  “So many things aren’t,” I said.

  22

  RICHIE HAD DROPPED Rosie off with Spike that afternoon, and she and Spike were in my loft in South Boston when I came home. They both kissed me. Spike settled for one, affectionate and passionless. Rosie inflicted the death of a thousand laps. Spike opened a bottle of Riesling and we sat at my little window alcove and sipped wine together. I had an extra-wide custom chair that I sat in to eat, which allowed Rosie to sit beside me. She sat there now, thrilled to have me home, and hopeful, probably, that we might have something to eat with the wine.

  “Eat on the plane?” Spike said.

  “Something unutterable,” I said, “which contained pasta.”

  “Best not to think of it,” Spike said.

  “Have you been here long?” I said.

  “Richie delivered Rosie around four,” Spike said. “I been here since.”

  “You haven’t been trying on my clothes, have you?”

  “I wanted to,” Spike said. “But there was a size problem.”

  “God, I hope so,” I said.

  “Tell me about LA,” Spike said.

  Which I did. By the time I got through, we had opened a second bottle of Riesling and my coherence was becoming endangered.

  “Erin was a hooker,” Spike said.

  “Yes. I suppose that’s why she pretended that Misty was just her assistant. The rigmarole with names. Keep her origins a mystery.”

  “She seems to keep getting rescued by men and being rebuilt. First the pimp…”

  “Gerard,” I said.
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  “Then Buddy Bollen.”

  “She married Gerard,” I said.

  “And she lives with Buddy.”

  I nodded.

  “How’s the pimp?” Spike said.

  “What’s he like?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What you’d expect. Self-important. Soulless. Filled with contempt for women. Except that he claims still to be in love with Erin. It doesn’t fit.”

  “Things don’t,” Spike said.

  “Be easier if they did,” I said.

  “But boring,” Spike said.

  “Still a man who exploits women for money,” I said.

  “Not all whores are exploited,” Spike said.

  I was a woman. I knew the official woman’s view of prostitution. I started to say it.

  “It’s not a victimless crime,” I said. “The whores are victims.”

  “Some,” Spike said. “Perhaps many. Nobody likes giving BJs at truck stops. But you’ve known whores who liked being whores.”

  I drank some wine. I looked at Rosie. She appeared agnostic about the question.

  “I…yes. I have,” I said. “Especially the high-end hookers. They like the good clothes, the nice restaurants, the luxury hotels, the good money. Hell, they like the sex. Don’t tell anyone in Cambridge I said that. I may have to go there someday.”

  “Maybe Erin liked it,” Spike said. “Given the way you describe her situation with Buddy, maybe she still does.”

  “Maybe,” I said.

  “Maybe the pimp really does love her,” Spike said.

  “Maybe.”

  “And while we’re speaking the unspeakable, maybe you did the nasty again with Tony Gault.”

  “It wasn’t nasty,” I said. “You’re just jealous.”

  “I only met him once when he was in Boston,” Spike said.

  “You know how you are,” I said.

  Spike grinned.

  “I know how both of us are,” he said. “You’re easy.”

  “I am not easy,” I said. “But I’m fun.”

  23

  PARADISE, MASSACHUSETTS, in late November was the perfect reentry fix from Southern California. It was gray. Snow was spitting. And the wind off the Atlantic was persistent. I parked in the lot next to the Paradise police station and went in to see the chief.

  “Back from California,” I said. “Ready to compare notes.”

  “Do you eat lunch?” Jesse said.

  “I do.”

  “Me too,” Jesse Stone said. “Let’s compare notes over it.”

  “That would be very nice,” I said.

  We walked together through Paradise to a restaurant called Daisy’s. The owner was a strapping woman with humorous eyes. Jesse introduced us. She showed us to a table, put two menus down, and left.

  “Sandwiches are good here,” Jesse said. “They bake their own bread.”

  I ordered tunafish on light rye. He ordered a lobster club on anadama bread. We both had mango iced tea.

  “How’s Cronjager,” Jesse said.

  “Good. He seems like a good man.”

  “He is. Did you meet Elaine?”

  “Yes. Smart woman.”

  “She is,” Jesse said. “Good woman, too.”

  “It’s like she’s the real captain,” I said.

  Jesse nodded.

  “She thinks so, and Cronjager lets her. How’s he look.”

  “Mature, gray hair, healthy.”

  “Hair was gray when I knew him,” Jesse said. “What do you know?”

  “Me first?” I said.

  He nodded. I told him what I knew about Erin and Misty. Jesse listened quietly. While I talked he sipped his iced tea occasionally and didn’t eat his sandwich.

  “You think Gerard actually loves her?” Jesse said when I finished.

  “I think he thinks he does,” I said.

  Jesse nodded.

  “Hard to know the difference sometimes,” he said.

  I took a ladylike little bite of my sandwich and looked at him for a moment while I chewed it. When people are quiet there’s a tendency to think that there is more to them than there seems to be. Usually you’re wrong. But sometimes there is.

  “Pimps don’t usually love women,” I said.

  “No,” Jesse said. “They don’t. But sometimes the women think they do, and sometimes the pimps think they do, too.”

  “Believe their own con,” I said.

  “Uh-huh.”

  “So do you think he flew out here in a jealous rage and killed Misty to punish Erin for leaving him?”

  “Seems a reach,” Jesse said.

  “He claims to be a martial-arts master.”

  “So he would probably know how to snap a neck,” Jesse said. “If he ever used it for real.”

  “Not just mat exercises?”

  “For real is different,” Jesse said.

  “Do you know anything?” I said.

  “Very little,” Jesse said. “But I’m used to it. Fingerprints are meaningless. Everybody at SeaChase used the gym, even Buddy. Plus the people who installed it, cleaned it.”

  “Alibis?”

  “Not many. Most people at SeaChase were alone during the time when Erin could have died. A few off-duty employees were with significant others. But nobody has an ironclad alibi. Including you.”

  “Am I a suspect?” I said.

  “No.”

  “Any suspects?”

  “No.”

  “How do you want to use what I’ve learned,” I said.

  “It’s your stuff,” he said. “How do you want to use it?”

  Jesse took his first bite of sandwich. I thought for a minute while he chewed.

  “I think you should bring her in and break it to her without saying where it came from,” I said.

  “If I bring Erin in, Buddy will come, too,” Jesse said.

  “And no doubt a lawyer.”

  “No doubt,” Jesse said. “You want to be there?”

  “Yes.”

  “But you don’t want to take credit for blowing her cover.”

  “No.”

  “She hired you to find out who killed Misty; what you’re doing is what you were hired to do,” Jesse said.

  “Even if she killed her sister?” I said.

  “You think she did?”

  “It doesn’t seem like she would,” I said. “Their history is Erin taking care of Misty.”

  Jesse nodded.

  “Be interesting to see what you’d do if she did,” Jesse said.

  “She hired me to find the killer,” I said.

  Jesse said “Yes” and took another bite of his sandwich.

  “Do you know anything else?” I said. “If not useful, at least interesting?”

  Jesse chewed carefully and swallowed and drank some tea.

  “Talked with Roy Linden,” Jesse said.

  “The baseball coach,” I said.

  “Yeah.”

  “What did you talk about?”

  “He and I knew some of the same people,” Jesse said. “We talked about that and after a while we talked about Erin.”

  “What did he say?”

  “Well, he’s got his official position,” Jesse said.

  “Which is that Erin will be a great major-league baseball player,” I said.

  “Um-hmm,” Jesse said.

  “But?”

  Jesse shook his head.

  “She won’t,” I said.

  “Roy doesn’t think so,” Jesse said.

  “Because?”

  “She won’t hit major-league pitching,” Jesse said.

  “But she can play the field?”

  “Probably. He thinks she can probably run down a lot of balls in center field and probably catch most of them. She’s got a mediocre arm, but plenty of big-league outfielders do. She can probably run the bases pretty good.”

  “But she won’t hit,” I said.

  “Roy doesn’t say so, but that’s what he thinks.”

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p; “How long has he been coaching her?”

  “Since she’s been with Buddy,” Jesse said.

  “So this is not a new plan,” I said.

  Jesse shook his head.

  “How do you know people that Roy Linden knows?”

  “We both played in the Pacific Coast League,” Jesse said.

  “Baseball?”

  “Yep.”

  “Did you ever play anywhere, like, you know, a place I’d have heard of?”

  “Played at Albuquerque,” Jesse said. “Triple A.”

  “What’s Triple A?”

  “One level short of the major leagues,” Jesse said.

  “But you didn’t make the major leagues?”

  “Hurt my shoulder, couldn’t throw anymore,” he said. “I was a shortstop.”

  “Oh, what a shame,” I said. “Do you miss it?”

  “Yes.”

  “If you hadn’t gotten hurt, would you have made the big leagues?”

  “Yes.”

  “You keep a baseball glove in your office.”

  “I play in the town softball league.”

  “So you can still play softball.”

  “I can throw well enough for that,” Jesse said.

  “Maybe you should go with me to watch Erin train with Roy Linden. Every morning. Taft University.”

  “What would that tell us?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “But it would be good to know what you thought of her chances.”

  “And it’s always better to know than not know,” Jesse said.

  “I think so,” I said.

  “And you’re fun to be with,” Jesse said.

  I smiled at him.

  “You have no idea,” I said.

  He raised his eyebrows.

  “Maybe I do,” he said.

  My face felt a little warm. I hadn’t meant to say that. The waitress came and refilled our iced-tea glasses. I put some Equal into my iced tea and sipped some. Jesse looked at me carefully. He probably looked at everything that way. Still, I was aware that I had dressed very thoughtfully when I decided to come see him. Gray jeans, a white shirt with big cuffs, worn with the shirttails out, a black velveteen jacket, and short boots with heels that should have been higher, but, being a detective, I felt that I needed the capacity for sudden mobility. Still, it was a great look, even without the stiletto heels, because it could be considered dressing up, or dressing down. I felt good about it.