Blue Screen

by Robert B. Parker

  His office was small, with a view of Wilshire Boulevard. The desk was a maple conference table. On one wall was a large framed picture of a woman with three adolescent girls.

  “Randall and Stone,” I said. “I’m Randall.”

  Perry looked at some notes on his desk.

  “Sunny,” he said.

  “Yes.”

  “And Jesse.”

  Jesse nodded.

  “I’m Perry,” he said. “You want to talk about Arlo Delaney.”

  “For starters,” I said. “We’re also interested in Gerard Basgall.”

  “Um-hm,” Perry said.

  “Start with Arlo,” Jesse said. “He worked here?”

  “Yeah. Dave Fine—Jacobson’s been dead twenty years—Fine wanted to establish an entertainment-law department. I don’t know where he found Delaney, but he came cheap, and he was a pretty shrewd guy.”

  “Do I hear a but in your voice, Perry?” I said.

  “But,” Perry said, “he had the ethical scruples of a fucking tarantula. You don’t mind swearing do you, Sunny?”

  “I like it,” I said. “Isn’t this the right business, in the right city, for a man with the ethical scruples of a fucking tarantula?”

  “Fine’s kind of aberrant,” Perry said.

  “How about you?” I said.

  Perry grinned. “I’m kind of aberrant, too.”

  “Practicing criminal law?” Jesse said.

  “That’s why I’m in a small office,” Perry said, “out here at the beach.”

  “You ought to be ashamed,” I said.

  Perry nodded sadly.

  “So,” he said, “Arlo comes here, and brings a few second-string clients along with him, for starters. Not much, but he hustles, and in time he brings in some names you’d know. We’re not talking George Clooney or Julia Roberts here, but some game-show hosts, some television people. He’s doing okay. He’s billing enough to keep Fine happy.”

  “How about Gerard Basgall?” Jesse said.

  “How about him?”

  “What can you tell us about him?”

  “Not much. He used to be a client. There’s the confidentiality thing.”

  “Sure,” Jesse said. “Did he know Delaney?”

  Perry thought for a moment, apparently saw no conflict, and said, “Yes. I put them in touch.”

  “Because?” I said.

  Perry thought some more and then shook his head.

  “Perry,” I said. “I understand the whole lawyer-client thing. We know Gerard is a pimp. We know you represented him and his whores when they were arrested. We know that everybody has a right to the best defense they can get.”

  Perry smiled.

  “Sadly for them, that was usually me,” Perry said. “Without acceding to your characterization of them, I did sometimes represent Gerard and some of his female employees in criminal matters.”

  “Nicely put,” I said. “We have a dead woman back home who was once an employee of Gerard Basgall. There is some sort of connection to Arlo Delaney, and we’re trying to see if we can close the circle with a connection to Gerard. Do you represent Gerard now?”

  “No,” Perry said. “I knew most of the girls; who was it?”

  “Edith Boverini,” Jesse said.

  Perry was still for a moment.

  Then he said, “Shit.”

  “You knew her,” I said.

  “Misty,” he said, “that was her, ah, professional name.”

  “And her sister?” I said.

  “Ethel,” Perry said. “Aka Erin.”

  “Do you know who Erin is now?” I said.

  “No.”

  “Erin Flint.”

  Perry was silent a minute, then he said, “Woman Warrior.”

  “That would be Ethel,” I said.

  “I’ll be damned,” he said.

  “You never saw her movies?”

  “Oh hell,” Perry said. “Of course not. What happened to Misty.”

  “Somebody broke her neck,” Jesse said.

  “With malice aforethought?”

  “We believe so,” Jesse said.

  Perry was quiet for a moment.

  “I liked Misty,” he said.

  “And somebody killed Delaney,” I said.

  “Yeah, I read that,” Perry said. “It was a while after he left here to become a mogul.”

  “Did he succeed?”

  “He and Newton were getting a lot of financing done. I don’t think he had made mogul yet.”

  “You seem sadder,” I said, “about Misty.”

  Perry nodded.

  “I liked Misty,” he said.

  “We think Misty’s death and Delaney’s death may be related,” I said. “And we want to see where Basgall fits in. Did he know Delaney?”

  “Yes,” Perry said.

  “Tell me about that.”

  Perry nodded thoughtfully.

  After some silence he said, “I introduced them.”

  I waited. Jesse was quiet, which I had come to learn was not unusual. One of the things I liked about Jesse was the steady depth of his silence.

  “Later,” Perry said, “if you need to, we can discuss what’s on the record, but right now it will be easier if I just talk for your ears only.”

  He looked at Jesse. Jesse nodded. He looked at me. I nodded.

  “Okay,” he said. “Gerard’s an odd duck. He’s a pimp. He’s a violent guy. I’m sure he’s killed people. But he also treats the girls better than pimps generally do. I never had any reason to think he slapped them around or didn’t pay them fair. And he was always careful about the situations he put them in. If it was hinky, he’d stay right around and make sure they were okay. Some of the violence that got him into the trouble and that I had to get him out of was probably against johns who misused Gerard’s girls. This was in the early days, when Gerard’s enterprise was a hands-on deal. Now he’s like a big executive and delegates things. I don’t know how the girls do now.”

  “A nice pimp,” Jesse said.

  “No, Gerard’s not nice. He’s a mean, arrogant bastard. But he always seemed to like the girls.”

  “Most pimps don’t,” I said.

  “Most pimps hate them,” Perry said. “But Gerard didn’t seem to.”

  “All the girls or just the Boverini sisters.”

  “All the girls,” Perry said. “It registered because you never see it much.”

  “So why did you hook him up with Delaney?” Jesse said.

  “He was looking to get Erin and Misty into the movies.”

  “Real movies?” Jesse said.

  “Real movies, not porn,” Perry said. “He asked me if I knew somebody.”

  “And you knew Delaney,” Jesse said.

  “Yeah. He had left here already, and set up with Newton.”

  “What did you think of his idea.”

  “The wrong thing,” Perry said. “He said they were so good-looking he was sure they could make it. I told him they were good-looking, especially Erin. But that beauty was the staple commodity out here. Everybody’s beauty queen comes here to be a star.”

  “But he insisted they were special,” I said.

  “Yeah. I told him he’d probably make more money out of having them fuck rich drunks in luxury hotel suites. Shows you what I know.”

  “Maybe you were right,” I said. “I don’t know how much he’s made out of her success.”

  “She’s not with him anymore?”

  “No.”

  “And Misty is dead. She ever make it?”

  “In the movies?” I said. “Not that I know.”

  “Too bad.”

  “And you know that he actually hooked up with Delaney,” Jesse said.

  “Yes.”

  “How about next of kin?” I said.

  “He had a wife, Doreen, I think.”

  “Got an address?”

  “Lemme look,” Perry said.

  He didn’t have a Rolodex; one point for him. He got an addr
ess book from his middle drawer and thumbed through it.

  “Last place I got for him,” Perry said, “is Sherman Oaks.”

  He wrote the address on a yellow sticky and handed it to Jesse.

  “Know anything else?” I said.

  “About Gerard?”

  “Yes.”

  “Gerard and I had a disagreement, and he left for another lawyer.”

  “What did you disagree about?” I said.

  “He always lied to me about things,” Perry said. “I told him I couldn’t represent him well if he lied to me.”

  “How did he react?”

  “He told me I didn’t represent him well anyway, and suggested I fuck off.” Perry smiled for a moment. “Last time I spoke with him.”

  “Anything you disagreed about that would help us?”

  Perry shook his head slowly.

  “No,” he said. “It was more like…if Gerard gave you the time of day, it would be wise to check with a second source.”

  “No wonder he wanted to get into the movie business,” I said.

  45

  ARLO DELANEY’S widow lived in a small apartment in a square and graceless white brick apartment building on Woodman Avenue a couple of blocks north of Ventura Boulevard. She acted as if she wasn’t happy to see us. But I think she was. It gave her a chance to bitch.

  We sat in her stale living room with a view of the Hollywood Freeway. She offered us sherry. We declined. She had some.

  “Ever since Arlo…” She shook her head. “It gets harder as the day wears on.”

  “I’m sorry for your loss,” Jesse said.

  She nodded and looked at her lap.

  “Loss,” she said, and sipped some sherry. “Loss.”

  She was a thin woman with pale skin and too much bright makeup. Her blond hair was too short and too colored. It looked brittle. She wore white slacks that were too loose, and a blue-and-yellow flowered blouse with the shirttails tied in front. Her slippers were lined with blue fur.

  “I know you have spoken of your husband’s death too often,” Jesse said. “But could you go through it again? We may have some fresh leads on it.”

  “What kind of police are you?” she said. “I forgot what you told me on the phone.”

  I was pretty certain that she was not on today’s first glass of sherry.

  “My name is Jesse Stone,” Jesse said. “I’m the chief of the Paradise, Massachusetts, Police Department. This is Sunny Randall. She’s a detective.”

  “You from Massachusetts, too?” Mrs. Delaney said.

  “Yes, ma’am,” I said.

  She nodded carefully. No one had said I was a police detective. On the other hand, no one had said I wasn’t. Her glass was empty.

  “Are you sure you won’t have some sherry?” she said.

  “No thank you,” I said.

  Jesse shook his head.

  “Sherry’s good for you,” Mrs. Delaney said. “Calms your nerves. Stimulates blood flow.”

  She poured herself some more.

  “Do you have any thought,” I said, “about who might have killed your husband and his partner?”

  “Do I have a thought? Do I have a thought? I don’t think of anything else. Five years he’s been gone, and I still think about him all the time.”

  Jesse nodded. “Hard business,” he said. “Who do you think might have done it?”

  “I know who did it, for God’s sake. I’ve always known.”

  Jesse and I waited. Mrs. Delaney drank some sherry, and swallowed and looked at her lap.

  “Who is it?” Jesse said after a while.

  “The whore,” she said.

  “What is the whore’s name,” Jesse said gently.

  “She calls herself Erin Flint.”

  “The actress,” I said.

  “The whore.”

  “She calls herself Erin Flint?” Jesse said.

  “She’s a guinea. Her real name is Boverini.”

  “Why did she kill him?” Jesse said.

  “Oh, maybe she didn’t pull the trigger,” Mrs. Delaney said.

  Her glass was empty. She refilled.

  “But it was her,” Mrs. Delaney said. “Hadn’t been for her, my Arlo would be alive….”

  Tears welled.

  “And so would I,” she said.

  Her eyes remained moist, but she didn’t cry.

  “Tell me about her part in it,” Jesse said.

  She drank some sherry. There was no hint of impatience in Jesse’s manner. We needed to get her pretty soon. In a while she’d be too drunk to talk.

  “She got her hooks in Arlo a long time ago. Long before she was Miss Movie Star.”

  “They had a relationship?” I said.

  “You could call it that, I guess,” Mrs. Delaney said. “She was fucking him.”

  “And you knew that?” I said.

  She drank and nodded, looking at her glass. It was a little cut-glass pony. At the rate the sherry was going in, it would have been more efficient to drink from a beer glass.

  “I got vaginal dryness,” she said.

  Jesse and I both nodded. His face showed nothing.

  “So sex is painful for me. Was painful for me.”

  She seemed to feel that was sufficient explanation and looked at her sherry glass some more.

  “So Arlo went elsewhere for, um, release?” I said.

  She nodded. “I guess I couldn’t blame him,” she said to me. “You know how men are.”

  I nodded as if I did. She drank some more sherry.

  “It’s not like I missed it much anyway,” she said. “Never did see why everybody made such a big fuss about it.”

  “Sex?” I said.

  “Yeah. I never thought it was much fun.”

  I nodded carefully. Jesse was blank.

  “How did he meet her?” I said.

  “Erin the whore?” she said. “His firm represented her pimp. Isn’t that a nice business for a law firm, representing pimps and whores.”

  “So he knew her pimp,” I said.

  “I guess.”

  “Did he ever mention the pimp’s name?”

  “Gerard something,” she said.

  “He tell you about him?”

  “Later, after he got into trouble.”

  “Tell us about the trouble,” Jesse said.

  We were both being careful in the way we asked questions. She was the kind of witness who would go wherever you led her, and lie to you because she thought you’d like it. Or because it would enlist your sympathy.

  “She wanted to be a movie star,” Mrs. Delaney said.

  “Erin Flint,” I said.

  Mrs. Delaney nodded and poured some more sherry. She didn’t seem to have gotten drunk yet. Maybe she had built a tolerance. Or maybe she was always drunk and had been when we arrived and was just planing on the booze.

  “Yes, the whore. And she tried to get Arlo to put her in the movies, and Arlo tells her it’s not so easy. And the pimp gets himself involved and I think he threatened Arlo.”

  “What did he threaten to do?” I said.

  “I don’t know. But Arlo was kind of scared.”

  “And?” I said.

  “And nothing. Arlo didn’t like to talk about it, her being his whore and stuff…didn’t keep him from doing it, a’course.”

  “So do you think it was Gerard who killed him and his partner?” Jesse said.

  “I don’t know. But it was because of the whore, I know that.”

  “How?” Jesse said.

  “Because I’m a woman,” Mrs. Delaney said. “A wife and a woman. And a woman knows other women.”

  Jesse looked at me without expression.

  “Absolutely,” I said. “Did you tell the Los Angeles police this?”

  “Of course not,” she said.

  “But you’re telling us,” I said.

  “I can talk to a woman,” she said.

  “The other detectives were men,” I said.

  “Detecti
ve Sanchez,” she said with an exaggerated accent. “And Detective Munoz. Do you think I’m going to sit here with two muchachos and talk about vaginal dryness?”

  I glanced at Jesse.

  “It’s good I came along,” I said.

  46

  SHE EVER HEAR of K-Y gel?” Jesse said when we were riding back through Beverly Glen.

  “I’m not sure it would have made much difference.”

  “She didn’t like it anyway,” Jesse said.

  “Erin might not have been the first,” I said. “You think there’s anything to what she says?”

  “It doesn’t contradict anything we know,” Jesse said.

  “Her brain is pretty well pickled,” I said.

  “And it hasn’t given her a sunny outlook.”

  “You’re just mad because she doesn’t like men,” I said.

  “That’s probably it,” Jesse said.

  At the foot of Beverly Glen we turned left onto Sunset. It was the Beverly Hills expensive part of Sunset, and got more so as we drove east toward Rodeo Drive.

  “It’s like we’re in a maze,” I said. “Every time we talk to a new person we get more information that leads us nowhere.”

  Jesse nodded. We turned down Rodeo Drive. It was early evening by now, after sundown. The lights in the luxury homes were clearly visible in the gathering darkness. I was driving through Beverly Hills, headed for a luxury hotel with a man whom I found very attractive. We had not had romantic contact since we slept together three thousand miles east. Jesse had been pleasant and professional and easy, as if we were friends, which we were fast becoming, more than lovers, which we had already been, at least once. Despite the easiness and the professionalism, however, there was between us a kind of erotic tension that we both accepted without comment. We both knew we’d revisit it.

  We crossed Santa Monica Boulevard and little Santa Monica, and drove through the implausibly chic shopping area to the Beverly Wilshire. We were both on expenses.

  “Does police travel in Paradise usually include hotels like this?”

  “They do for the chief,” Jesse said.

  “Who approves the travel expenses?” I said.

  “The chief,” Jesse said.

  We gave the car to the valet and went into the lobby.

  “Want a drink?” Jesse said.

  “As long as it’s not sherry,” I said.

  We turned right into the bar and sat at a small table. The unremarked tension between us became a little more insistent. Jesse had a tall scotch and soda. I got a Cosmopolitan. We touched glasses. The bar was nearly two-thirds full. It was a good-looking crowd, well-dressed generally, and not loud. I always liked not loud.