Hush Money s-26

by Robert B. Parker

  “Sweet science is what happened to my nose,” I said. “Were you KC Roth’s boyfriend?”

  “What is this in regard to?”

  “A criminal case.”

  “Something happen to her?”

  “Nothing permanent,” I said.

  “Well, I… I wouldn’t want anything to happen to her.”

  “She’s fine,” I said. “You were her boyfriend?”

  He shrugged and grinned. His teeth gleamed.

  “Well, I can count on your discretion?” he said.

  “In my business,” I said, “you’re discreet or you’re not in business.”

  It wasn’t really true. I’d blab his name in a minute if I needed to, but there was no point in telling him that. And the answer I gave him sounded like the kind of answer he’d want to believe.

  “Yeah, same in my business. You know? You’re fucking with people’s money, babe, and their hair stands up real stiff.”

  “So you and KC Roth?”

  He grinned, hands still clasped behind his head. He put his feet up on the corner of the desk.

  “She could fuck the balls off a brass monkey,” he said.

  “Good to know.”

  “Don’t misunderstand,” he said. “I’m married and plan to stay that way, but, ah, you’ve seen KC?”

  “Un huh.”

  “So you can see how easy it would be to wander off the reservation one time.”

  My guess was that he’d been wandering off the reservation since his voice changed.

  “Easy,” I said.

  “Well, I did and I’m not proud of it, but it was a ride.”

  He winked at me. We knew the score, he and I. Couple of studs. More notches on the weapon than John Wesley Harding.

  “Why’d it end?” I said.

  “For crissake she left her husband. She wanted me to marry her.”

  “Don’t you hate when that happens,” I said.

  “You better believe it. I got three kids, big job, my wife’s no slouch in the sack either, mind you. KC wanted us to go to Key West and live on the beach.”

  He laughed. I laughed. Women are so silly. Fortunately there are a lot of them.

  “What a ditz,” he said. “I told her this isn’t about love, KC, this is about fucking. You know what she said? You wanna know?”

  “What’d she say?”

  “She says, ‘What’s the difference?’ You believe that? What’s the difference.”

  He chuckled. I chuckled too. Man of the world.

  “She didn’t threaten you when you dumped her?” I said.

  “With what?”

  “Tell your wife?”

  “No. She wouldn’t. She’s not like that. She’s a really sappy broad, but she’s not mean. Besides I think she likes the drama. She’s all drama. She likes the drama of a clandestine affair, and she likes the drama of a sorrowful breakup, and being heartbroken and all that.”

  Vincent was a little smarter than he seemed. Or I was as dumb as he was. I too thought that life for KC was a series of dramatic renditions.

  “Somebody is stalking her,” I said.

  “And you’re coming to me?”

  “Ex-husbands, ex-boyfriends, that’s where you usually go,” I said.

  “Hey pal, I dumped her, you know. I’m not some heartbroken loser sneaking around in the dark. There’s plenty more where she came from. Try her husband.”

  “You replace her yet?” I said.

  He grinned at me.

  “Like Kleenex,” he said. “Use once and discard. There’s plenty more.”

  “Your wife?” I said.

  He shrugged.

  “She’s fine. House in Weston. Kids in private school. Drives a Range Rover. Plays golf. Sex is still good. I’m home at least three nights a week.”

  “What could be better?” I said.

  He nodded enthusiastically. Irony was not his strength.

  “It’s a pretty good gig,” he said. “I gotta admit it. There much money in your line of work?”

  “No,” I said. “But you meet interesting people.”

  He stood and put out his hand.

  “Nice talking to you.”

  “You have no thoughts on who might be stalking KC?” I said. “Knowing KC,” he said, “she probably made him up. Have fun.”

  I nodded.

  “Fun’s what it’s all about,” I said.

  “And the winner dies broke,” he said.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Susan and I were walking back to Linnaean Street from the Charles Hotel where we had lunched with her friends Chuck and Janet Olson at Henrietta’s Table.

  “Your friends are nice,” I said.

  “Yes, they are.”

  “As nice as my friends?” I said.

  “Like Hawk, say? Or Vinnie Morris?”

  “Well, yes.”

  “Please!” Susan said.

  We were on Garden Street walking past the Harvard Police Station. I decided to move the conversation forward, and told her about my encounter with Louis Vincent at Hall, Peary.

  “Kleenex?” Susan said. “Women are like Kleenex?”

  “Un huh. Use and discard. There’s plenty more.”

  I watched her ears closely to see if any steam escaped. But she was controlled.

  “The man is an absolute fucking pig,” she said.

  “There’s that,” I said.

  “I want him to be the stalker.”

  “Because he’s a pig?”

  “Yes.”

  “Does he fit the profile?”

  Susan glared at me for a moment, before she said, “No.”

  “He appears to be one of the masters of the universe,” I said. “Good-looking, well married, good job, lots of dough, endless poon tang on the side. Stalkers are usually losers.”

  “I know.”

  “It’s usually about control,” I said. “Isn’t it?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’d guess this guy is in control.”

  “Not of his libido,” Susan said.

  “No, maybe not,” I said. “On the other hand KC wasn’t bopping him under duress.”

  Susan gave a long sigh.

  “No,” Susan said, “she wasn’t.”

  “And she didn’t dump him, did she?”

  Susan thought about that.

  “In one sense,” she said, “maybe not. She left her husband to marry him. He said, ‘I won’t marry you.’ But who said, ‘Therefore it’s over’?”

  I raised both eyebrows. I could raise one eyebrow, like Brian Donlevy, but I didn’t very often, because most people didn’t know who Brian Donlevy was, or what I was doing with my face.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I’ll ask.”

  Susan looked pleased.

  “Maybe he could still be the stalker.”

  “We can always hope,” I said.

  We reached Linnaean Street and turned right toward Susan’s place.

  “How about that thing you’re doing for Hawk?”

  “Well, it is, I believe, turning into a hair ball.”

  “Oh?”

  “I don’t think the Lamont kid killed himself.”

  “Why not?”

  I told her how his friends said he was happy and how they were scornful of the possibility that he was having an affair with Robinson Nevins and how the window was hard to open and how Lamont was said to be approximately the size of a dandelion, but not as strong.

  “Suicides often appear happy prior to the suicide,” Susan said. “They’ve decided to do it.”

  “Thus solving all their problems.”

  “And getting even with whomever they are getting even.”

  “Which is usually why people do it?”

  “Yes,” Susan said. “The pathology is often similar, oddly enough, to the pathology which causes stalking – see what you’ve made me do is a kind of back door control. It forces emotion from the object of your ambivalence.”

  “I don’t think he coul
d have opened the window,” I said.

  “Maybe it was conveniently open when the time came. Maybe its openness was the presenting moment, so to speak.”

  “I checked,” I said. “It was thirty-six degrees, raining hard, with a strong wind on the day he went out.”

  Susan smiled at me.

  “So much for psychoanalytic hypothesis,” she said.

  “It’s very helpful,” I said. “Especially when you asked about who actually ended KC’s affair. But it isn’t intended to replace the truth, is it?”

  “No. It’s intended to get at it.”

  We went into Susan’s office. Her office and waiting room and what she called her library (it looked remarkably like a spare room with a bath to me) were on the first floor. Her quarters, and Pearl’s, were on the second. When Susan opened the door to her living room, Pearl bounded about giving and receiving wet kisses, torn with her passion to greet us both at the same time. But, being a dog, she quickly got over her bifurcating ambivalence and went back and sat on the sofa with her tongue out and looked at us happily.

  Susan got me a beer from her refrigerator and poured herself a bracing glass of Evian, and we sat down together at her kitchen counter. Pearl sat on the floor beside us in case we moved into eating.

  “So where to now,” Susan said.

  “One thing is I’ll ask KC to go through the breakup, see if he might have experienced it as her leaving him. Second, I figure that Louis has fooled around before.”

  “I think you can bank on it,” Susan said.

  “So I’m going to see if I can find a few former girlfriends and see if there’s been any stalking. If he’s a wacko, KC can’t be the only one he’s been a wacko with.”

  Susan nodded and sipped some Evian. I drank some beer.

  “How about the other case?”

  “I’ve got a stack of back issues of the magazine that Lamont published: OUTrageous.”

  “As in OUT of the closet?”

  “Yes. I’ll read through that and see if there’s a suspect. I’ll look at the plans for future issues, which I also have, and see if there’s any suspects there.”

  “And if there aren’t?”

  “Then I’ll try to establish whether there was or was not a relationship between Nevins and Lamont, and if there was why people didn’t know and if there wasn’t why people said there was.”

  “And if that doesn’t work?”

  “I’ll ask you,” I said.

  “For some psychoanalytic theory?”

  “Can’t hurt,” I said. “What I think we should do is go take a shower and brush our teeth and lie on my bed and see what kind of theory we can develop.”

  “I’m pretty sure I know what will develop,” I said.

  “Should we shower together?” Susan said.

  “If we do, things may develop too soon.”

  “Good point,” Susan said. “I’ll go first.”

  “And Pearl?” I said.

  “In the living room with the TV on Fox – loud. She loves to watch Catherine Crier.”

  “Anyone would,” I said.

  And Susan disappeared into her bedroom.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  KC Roth poured some white wine into her glass.

  “I was about to have lunch, I could make us both something,” she said.

  “Thank you, no,” I said. “Just a couple questions.”

  “Did you see him?”

  “Vincent?”

  She smiled as if I had prayed aloud.

  “I saw him,” I said. “Handsome devil.”

  “Oh isn’t he,” she said. “What did he say?”

  “He said he didn’t stalk you.”

  “What else.”

  She was sitting on the pink sofa in the bay window of her beige living room. I was back in the uncomfortable gray chair.

  “Nothing of consequence,” I said. “Could you run back over the breakup.”

  Her eyes filled. She sipped some more white wine.

  “I don’t think I can,” she said.

  “Well, let me help you focus. Who said that you would no longer sleep together.”

  “What difference does it make?” she said. “It’s over.”

  There were tears now on her cheeks. She wiped them with the back of her left hand.

  “It might make a difference,” I said. “I know it’s painful, but think back. Who decided that you’d stop making love.”

  She drank wine again and looked down at her lap and answered me so softly that I couldn’t hear her.

  “Excuse me?” I said.

  “I did,” she said. “I told him that if he wouldn’t leave his wife then I wouldn’t fuck him until he did.”

  “Negotiating ploy?” I said.

  She looked up and her eyes though teary were harder than one would have thought.

  “I was desperate,” she said.

  “But you meant it.”

  “Well, he had to lose something too,” she said. “He couldn’t have everything. I have to leave my beautiful house and my beautiful daughter…” Now she was not just teary, now she was crying. “I have to live in this… this cell block. He can’t keep on fucking me. He has to give up something.”

  “Fair’s fair,” I said.

  Struggling with her crying she said, “Could you… could you come and sit beside me?”

  “Sure.”

  I went and sat on the couch beside her and she leaned over and put her face against my chest and sobbed. I put an arm around her shoulder and patted. Uncle Spenser, tough but oh so gentle. After a while she stopped crying, but she stayed with her. face pressed against my chest, and turned a little so she had snuggled in against me.

  “So in fact you broke it off,” I said. “Not him.”

  “All he had to do was leave his wife.”

  “Which he wouldn’t.”

  “He can’t. She’s too dependent.”

  “But he’d have been willing to have you as his girlfriend.”

  “Yes.”

  “Being the only one cheating in fact didn’t bother him.”

  She shrugged.

  “No,” she said. “Sometimes I say things because they sound right.”

  “Most people do,” I said.

  She seemed to wriggle a little tighter against me, though I didn’t see her move.

  “You’re very understanding,” she said.

  “Yep.”

  “And you always seem so clear.”

  “Clear,” I said.

  “Have you ever cheated on Susan?”

  “Once. Long time ago.”

  “Really?”

  “Yep.”

  “She ever cheat on you?”

  “That would be for her to answer,” I said.

  “If she did would you care?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did she care the time you did?”

  “Yes.”

  “How’d she find out?”

  “I told her.”

  “Would she have known if you hadn’t told her?”

  “Maybe not.”

  “Why did you tell her?”

  “Seemed a good idea at the time,” I said.

  “If you did again would she care?”

  “Yes.”

  “Would you tell her?”

  “I’ll decide after I do it again.”

  “Do you think you’ll do it again?” she said.

  I couldn’t figure out how she had moved so much closer to me, since she had started out leaning on me.

  “Day at a time,” I said.

  My voice sounded a little hoarse. She turned her head slightly on my chest so she could look up at me. One hand kneaded my left bicep.

  “You’re awfully strong, aren’t you?”

  I cleared my throat.

  “It’s because my heart is pure,” I said.

  I was still hoarse. I cleared my throat again. Her face was so close to mine that her lips brushed my face when she spoke.

  “Really?�
�

  “Sort of pure,” I said.

  She raised her head a couple of millimeters and kissed me hard on the mouth. It seemed ungallant to struggle. She pulled her head back.

  “When you kiss me put your tongue in my mouth,” she said.

  Her voice had thickened and grown richer, so that it had acquired the quality of butterscotch sauce. She kissed me again and opened her mouth. I kept my tongue to myself. She pressed harder. I thought that somewhere there must be laughter, as I clung to my chastity. Finally she pulled her head back and looked at me.

  “Don’t you want to fuck me?” she said.

  “Very respectfully, no.”

  “My God, why not. I know you’re aroused.”

  “You’re very desirable,” I said. “And I get aroused at green lights.”

  “Then, what?”

  “I’m not at liberty, so to speak.”

  “My God, you’re Victorian. A Victorian prude.”

  I disagreed, but arguing about my prudishness didn’t seem productive. I shrugged.

  “It’s because of Susan?”

  “Sure,” I said.

  She had sat up and was no longer leaning against me. This was progress, it would help my arteries relax. KC poured some more white wine and drank a swallow.

  “What’s so great about Susan?”

  ‘The way she wears her hat,“ I said. ’The way she sips her tea.”

  “Seriously, what’s so special about her? I mean I’ve known her longer than you have, since we were in college. She’s so vain, for God’s sake.”

  “I’m not so sure it’s vanity,” I said.

  Better to be talking about Susan than about what to do with my tongue.

  “Well, what the hell is it, then. Hair, makeup, clothes, exercise, diet, always has to look perfect.”

  “Well,” I said, “maybe she thinks of her appearance as a work of art in progress, sort of like painting or sculpture.”

  “And she’s so pretentious, for God’s sake. She’s always like lecturing.”

  “And maybe not everyone gets it,” I said.

  “Gets what?”

  “Susan’s pretty good at irony.”

  “What’s that mean?”

  “She understands herself well enough to make fun of herself,” I said.

  “You’ll defend her no matter what I say, won’t you?”

  “Yep.”

  KC got up and walked to the other side of the room and stared out the window at the blacktop parking lot behind her building.

  “Do you think Louis is the stalker?”