Vinnie was back behind the bar. He started putting my scotch and soda together while he talked. His voice was quiet in the big formal room.
“Well, Joe has this, whaddya call it, this network in place for a while. He builds it slow, careful, for a long time. Does business with guys we can trust, our kind of people, steady guys, you know? Not flighty, you might say.”
He put the glass up on the bar and I stood and walked across the room and took it and went and sat back down. Vinnie started making himself a drink. Joe’s back was perfectly still as he stared out the window. If he heard Vinnie talking he didn’t show it. He stared at the rain as if he’d never see it again.
“Well, Joe’s interested in Gerry learning all of the business, so he puts Gerry in charge of overseeing that part of things, paying out; and Gerry decides it should be changed a little.”
Vinnie had a thick lowball glass of bourbon over ice. He took a taste as he walked around the bar, and leaned on it. He nodded his head slightly, approving of the bourbon. He glanced over at Joe’s silent motionless back.
“Gerry started buying up cops like they were made in Hong Kong. He’s paying off people at school crossings, you know. And he’s got this guy Rich Beaumont as his bagman. Pretty soon Gerry’s got a payroll, looks like the welfare list, makes us like the third-biggest employer in the state. And he’s not choosy. Anybody he can bribe, he bribes. Joe hears about it first because one of our guys hears one of Gerry’s guys bragging about it. About how he’s got Gerry shoving money up his nose, and the guy’s laughing. The guy can’t do him any good. He’s like in Community Relations and Gerry thinks he’s still in Vice, and the guy’s laughing at us.”
“And talking,” I said.
Vinnie looked at the bourbon in his glass for a long moment. He stuck one finger in and moved the ice around a little and took the finger out and sucked off the bourbon, and ran the back of his hand across his lips.
“And talking,” Vinnie said. He took another swallow of bourbon. I drank some scotch.
From the window Joe said, “Vinnie,” and held his hand out with the empty glass in it. Vinnie walked over and took it and brought it back and made another one.
“So I talked with Joe about it,” Vinnie said. “And we decided we’d have to talk with Gerry about it, only by the time we did get to talk with him . . .”
Vinnie walked across the room with the fresh Campari and soda and put it in Joe’s hand. Then he returned to the bar and gazed for a moment at Joe’s back. He took in some bourbon. Then he looked straight at me.
“. . . Beaumont had taken off with a bagful of our money.”
“How much?” I said.
Vinnie shook his head. “You don’t need to know.”
“No,” I said, “I don’t. But I need to know if it was enough.”
“It was enough,” Vinnie said. “He was skimming what he paid out and then, lately, he wasn’t paying anybody—and mostly it was okay because the people he was supposed to be paying couldn’t do us anything anyway.”
“More than a million?” I said.
“Don’t matter,” Vinnie said.
“Matters when I look for him,” I said. “Where I look depends on what he can afford.”
“Okay, more than a million. He can afford pretty much anything he wants. But that ain’t the point. The point is you can’t stay in business and let a chipmunk like Richie Beaumont take your money and give you the finger. He can’t be allowed to get away with it.”
“I understand that,” I said. “I got no problem with that.”
We were all quiet then, the three of us, sipping our drinks at 11:30 in the morning, while it rained outside.
From the window Joe said, “You gotta stay out of Gerry’s way, Spenser. He’s got to find Beaumont himself. He’s got to get the money back. He’s got to put Beaumont down. He don’t do that, what is he? What kind of man is he to run this thing we got? What do they think of him? What do I think of him?”
Joe’s voice had none of the audition-booth resonance now; it was hoarse. “What the fuck does he think of himself?”
“We got a problem,” I said. “I don’t say it can’t be resolved, but it’s a problem.”
“We got nothing against the broad,” Vinnie said.
“Sure,” I said. “But what if she’s with him when Gerry finds him, and he puts up a fight and Gerry has to kill him and she sees it? Or what if he’s told her all about his deal with Gerry?”
“We guarantee her safety?” Joe said softly.
“You can’t,” I said.
“You wouldn’t take my word on it?” Joe said. “Vinnie’s word?”
“I’d take Vinnie’s word, but not Gerry’s.”
“Or mine?”
I shrugged.
“We can’t guarantee it, Joe,” Vinnie said. His voice was flat, very careful.
Joe nodded slowly.
“You got a suggestion?” he said to me.
“I’ll do the best I can, Joe. I don’t like you but he’s your kid. I find Beaumont, I’ll leave him in place and take the woman. I won’t hold Beaumont for Gerry, and I won’t tell Gerry where he is, but I’ll leave him out there for Gerry to hunt.”
“You find him you give him to Vinnie,” Broz said.
“And Vinnie will put him where Gerry can find him and Gerry will think he won.”
Joe shrugged. I looked at Vinnie. Vinnie was staring past us both, looking at the harbor. There was no expression on his face.
“No,” I said. “I won’t give Beaumont to Vinnie.”
Joe sighed slowly.
“There’s an option we ain’t spoken of yet,” he said. He was tired; the ain’t had crept in past his self-consciousness. “We could whack you.”
“Maybe you could whack me,” I said. “It’s been tried. But where would that get you? It’ll attract the attention of people you’d rather not attract. A lot of people know what I’m working on.”
“Hawk,” Vinnie said.
“For one,” I said. “And there’d be a homicide investigation.”
“Quirk,” Vinnie said, as if he were counting off a list.
“So you trade me for them,” I said, “maybe some others.”
My drink was gone. I didn’t want another one. The room was full of harshness and pain and a bitterness that had been distilled by silence. I wanted to get out of there.
“It’s my kid, Spenser,” Broz said. He sounded as if his throat were closing.
“I’m in sort of the same position, Joe.”
“He’s got to get some respect,” Broz said.
I didn’t say anything. Gerry wasn’t going to get respect. He couldn’t earn it and Joe couldn’t earn it for him. Joe was silent, his hands folded, looking at his thumbs. He seemed to have gone somewhere.
After a while Vinnie Morris said, “Okay, Spenser. That’s it. We’ll talk to you later.”
I stood. Broz didn’t look up. I turned and walked toward the door across the big office. Vinnie walked with me.
At the door I said to Vinnie, “If Gerry gets in my way I will walk over him.”
“I know,” Vinnie said. He looked back at Joe Broz. “But if you do, you know who Joe will send.”
I nodded. I turned back and looked at Joe.
“Tough being the boss’s son,” I said.
Joe didn’t answer. Vinnie held the door open. And I went out.
CHAPTER
21
PEARL didn’t like the rain. She hung back when Susan and I took an after-dinner stroll, even when Susan pulled on her leash. And when we prevailed through superior strength, she kept turning and looking up at me, and pausing to jump up and put her forepaws on my chest and look at me as if to question my sanity.
“I heard that i
f you step on their back paws when they jump up like that, they learn not to,” Susan said.
“Shhh,” I said. “She’ll hear you.”
Susan had a big blue and white striped umbrella and she carried it so that it protected her and Pearl from the rain. Pearl didn’t quite get it, and kept drifting out from under its protection and getting splattered and turning to look at me. I had on my leather trench coat and the replica Boston Braves hat that Susan had ordered for me through the catalogue from Manny’s Baseball Land. It was black with a red visor and a red button. There was a white B on it and when I wore it I looked very much like Nanny Fernandez.
“What will you do?” Susan said.
“I’ll try to extract Patty Giacomin from the puzzle and leave the rest of it intact.”
“And you won’t warn Rich?”
“No need to warn him. He knows he’s in trouble.”
“But you won’t try to save him?”
“No.”
“Isn’t that a little flinty?” Susan said.
“Yes.”
“Officially, here in Cambridge,” Susan said, “we’re supposed to value all life.”
“That’s the official view here in Cambridge of people who will never have to act on it,” I said.
“That is true of most of the official views here in Cambridge,” Susan said.
“My business is with Patty—Paul really. Rich Beaumont had to know what he was getting himself into—and besides I seem to feel a little sorry for Joe.”
Pearl had wedged herself between my legs and Susan’s, managing to stay mostly under her part of Susan’s umbrella, and while she didn’t seem happy, she was resigned. We turned the corner off Linnaean Street and walked along Mass Avenue toward Harvard Square.
“You are the oddest combination,” Susan said.
“Physical beauty matched with deep humility?”
“Aside from that,” Susan said. “Except maybe for Hawk, you look at the world with fewer illusions than anyone I have ever known. And yet you are as sentimental as you would be if the world were pretty-pretty.”
“Which it isn’t,” I said.
“You cook a good chicken too,” Susan said.
“Takes a tough man,” I said, “to make a tender chicken.”
“How come you cook so well?”
“It’s a gift,” I said.
“One not, apparently, bestowed on me.”
“You do nice cornflakes,” I said.
“Did you always cook?” she said.
Pearl darted out from under the umbrella long enough to snuffle the possible spoor of a fried chicken wing, near a trash barrel, then remembered the rain and ducked back in against my leg.
“Since I was small,” I said.
As we passed Changsho Restaurant, Pearl’s head went down and her ears pricked and her body elongated. She had found the lair of the chicken wings she’d been tracking earlier.
“Remember,” I said, “there were no women. Just my father, my uncles, and me. So all the chores were done by men. There was no woman’s work. There were no rules about what was woman’s work. In our house all work was man’s work. So I made beds and dusted and did laundry, and so did my father, and my uncles. And they took turns cooking.”
We were past Changsho, Pearl looked back over her shoulder at it, but she kept pace with us and the protective umbrella. There was enough neon in this part of Mass Avenue so that the wet rain made it look pretty, reflecting the colors and fusing them on the wet pavement.
“I started when I was old enough to come home from school alone. I’d be hungry, so I’d make myself something to eat. First it was leftovers—stew, baked beans, meat loaf, whatever. And I’d heat them up. Then I graduated to cooking myself a hamburg, or making a club sandwich, and one day I wanted pie and there wasn’t any so I made one.”
“And the rest is history,” Susan said.
A big MBTA bus pulled up at the stop beside us, the water streaming off its yellow flanks, the big wipers sweeping confidently back and forth across the broad windshield.
“Well, not entirely,” I said. “The pie was edible, but a little odd. I didn’t like to roll out the crust, so I just pressed overlapping scraps of dough into the bottom of the pie plate until I got a bottom crust.”
“And the top crust?”
“Same thing.”
The pneumatic doors of the bus closed with that soft, firm sound that they make and the bus ground into gear and plowed off through the rain.
“My father came home and had some and said it was pretty good and I should start sharing in the cooking. So I did.”
“So all of you cooked?”
“Yeah, but no one was proprietary about it. It wasn’t anyone’s accomplishment, it was a way to get food in the proper condition to eat.”
“Your father sounds as if he were comfortable with his ego,” Susan said.
“He never felt the need to compete with me,” I said. “He was always very willing for me to grow up.”
Pearl had located a discarded morsel of chewing gum on the pavement and was mouthing it vigorously. Apparently she found it unrewarding, because after a minute of ruminative mouthing she opened her jaws and let it drop out.
“There’s something she won’t eat,” Susan said.
“I would have said there wasn’t,” I said.
We passed the corner of Shepard Street. Across Mass Avenue, on the corner of Wendell Street, the motel had changed names again.
“I got to shop some too,” I said, “though mostly for things like milk and sugar. My father and my uncles had a vegetable garden they kept, and they all hunted, so there was lots of game. My father liked to come home after ten, twelve hours of carpentering and work in his garden. My uncles didn’t care for the garden much, but they liked the fresh produce and they were too proud to take it without helping, so they’d be out there too. Took up most of the backyard. In the fall we’d put up a lot of it, and we’d smoke some game.”
“Did you work in the garden?” Susan said.
“Sure.”
“Do you miss it?”
“No,” I said. “I always hated gardening.”
“So when we retire you don’t want to buy a little cottage and tend your roses?”
“While you’re inside baking up some cookies,” I said, “maybe brewing a pot of tea, or a batch of lemonade that you’d bring me in a pitcher.”
“What a dreadful thought,” Susan said.
“Yes,” I said. “I prefer to think I can be the bouncer in a retirement home.”
The Cambridge Common appeared through the shiny down-slanted rain. Pearl elongated a little when she sniffed it. There were always squirrels there, and Pearl had every intention of catching one.
“And you?” I said.
“When I retire?”
“Yeah.”
Susan looked at the wet superstructure of the children’s swing set for a moment as we crossed toward it.
“I think,” she said, “that I shall remain young and beautiful forever.”
We reached the Common and Pearl was now in low tension, leaning against the leash, her nose apparently pressed against the grass, sniffing.
“Well,” I said, “you’ve got a hell of a start on it.”
“Actually,” she said, “I don’t suppose either of us will retire. I’ll practice therapy, and teach, and write some. You’ll chase around rescuing maidens and slaying dragons, annoying all the right people.”
“Someday I may not be the toughest kid on the block,” I said.
She shook her head. “Someday you may not be the strongest,” she said. “I suspect you’ll always be the toughest.”
“Good point,” I said.
CHAPTER
22
PAUL and I were working out in the Harbor Health Club. Paul was doing pelvic tilt sit-ups. I could do some. But Paul seemed able to do fifty thousand of them and had the annoying habit of pausing to talk during various phases of the sit-up without any visible strain. He was doing it now.
“Maybe,” he said, “we were out in Lenox asking the wrong questions of the wrong people.”
I was doing concentration curls, with relatively light weight, and many reps. Paul had been slowly weaning me from the heavy weights. It’s the amount of work, not the amount of weight.
“Almost by definition,” I said, trying to sound easy as I curled the dumbbells. “Since what we did produced nothing.”
“Well, I mean I know I’m a dancer and you’re a detective, but . . .”
“Go ahead,” I said. “If you’ve got a good idea, my ego can stand it—unless it’s brilliant.”
“It’s not brilliant,” Paul said. He curled down and up and down again, and began curling up on an angle to involve the lateral obliques. “But if I had more than a million dollars in cash, and I were running away from the kind of people you’ve described, maybe I wouldn’t stay in a hotel.”
I finished the thirtieth curl and began to do hammer curls.
“Because you wouldn’t be making a temporary departure,” I said.
“That’s right,” Paul said. “You’d know you could never come back.”
“So maybe you’d buy a place, or rent a place.”
“Yes. I don’t know what property costs, but if I had a million dollars . . .”
“More than a million,” I said. “Yeah. You’d stay in a hotel if you were on your way somewhere. But if you were going to make it a permanent hideout, you’d want something more.”
“Could you buy a place without proving your identity?” Paul said.
I put down the barbells. They were bright chrome. Everything was upscale at the Harbor Health Club except Henry Cimoli, who owned it. Henry hadn’t changed much since he’d fought Willie Pep, except that the scar tissue had, with time, thickened around his eyes, so that now he always looked as if he were squinting into the sun.
Robert B. Parker: The Spencer Novels 1?6 Page 46
