Hush Money s-26

by Robert B. Parker

  “Yes.”

  “Sounds like he was avoiding the cash reporting laws.”

  “It does,” Morgan said.

  “Would he have paid cash for the bank check?”

  “Probably. I can call over there for you.”

  “I’d appreciate it.”

  While he called, I looked out the window of his office and into the window of the office across from his. There was a guy in shirtsleeves and suspenders on the phone and another guy looking out the window at me looking out the window at him. Was there a guy in shirtsleeves and suspenders talking on the phone on the other side of the building while another guy stared out the window at a guy in shirtsleeves… I shook my head and turned back to Morgan.

  “Thank you, Bricky,” he said. “I owe you lunch.”

  He hung up and turned to me.

  “Cash money,” Morgan said. “In hundreds, ninety of them. Several times a week. Each time he’d get a bank check made out to him.”

  “How often did he deposit with you?”

  Morgan looked at his screen for a few moments.

  “Averaged about twice a month.”

  “So what did he do with the rest?”

  “Wine, women, and song?” Morgan said.

  “Probably not women,” I said.

  Morgan shrugged.

  “Cigarettes, whiskey, and wild, wild men?” he said.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “If he was going to spend it, why did he convert it to bank checks?”

  “Maybe put it in his checking account.”

  “Why not just deposit the cash?” I said.

  Morgan shrugged.

  “Hey, I’m a simple stockbroker,” he said. “You’re the fucking sleuth.”

  “Thanks for reminding me,” I said. “Sometimes it’s hard to tell.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  When I got back from Hall, Peary, KC Roth was waiting in the hall outside my office door wearing an ethereal-looking white summer dress. She appeared not to be wearing stockings. Her legs were tanned. She had on white high heels with no back. Even in the harsh fluorescent light she looked like a slumming angel.

  “We must talk,” she said.

  I unlocked my door. KC preceded me into the office. As soon as the door closed behind us, KC turned and pressed herself against me and put her arms around my neck and kissed me urgently.

  “Kiss me back,” she murmured.

  After a while she moved her mouth away and whispered, “Hold me.”

  She moved her body against mine in several different directions. I had never figured out how women did that. On the other hand I’d never actually hugged a man. Maybe they did it too and I didn’t know it.

  “I’ve wanted you since I saw you,” KC whispered.

  “Don’t blame you,” I muttered.

  “Put your hands on me.”

  “They are on you.”

  “They’re on my shoulders,” KC said.

  “It’s a start,” I said.

  She pushed against me more insistently. I would have said more insistent was not possible, but she managed. She bent her head back and looked up at me, and her lips brushed mine as she spoke.

  “Have you ever made love in this office?” she said.

  “No,” I said, “I was waiting to get a couch.”

  “You could take me now, here, on the floor.”

  “I think we’ve gone through this,” I said.

  “Come on, you want to.”

  “Of course I want to,” I said. “But I’m not going to.”

  “You have to,” she said. “You have to.”

  “You left your husband for a guy and didn’t end up with the guy,” I said. “You’re being stalked. You’re feeling shaky. You need affirmation, and here I am, the guy who’s going to rescue you from the stalker.”

  “That’s just talk,” she said. “You’re a man and I’m a woman.”

  There wasn’t much room to maneuver around that, so I left it alone. I didn’t have a lot of experience fighting for my virtue.

  “You ever fuck Susan here?” she said, her face almost touching mine.

  “I’m impressed,” I said. “The question is intrusive, annoying, coarse, and voyeuristic, that’s quite a lot to get into a simple question.”

  “Well, did you? I’ll bet you didn’t. I’ll bet she wouldn’t. She wouldn’t want to do it in a chair,” KC’s voice got very flutey, “because it wouldn’t be ladylike. And she wouldn’t want to do it on the floor because she’d be afraid she’d mess her clothes.”

  “Enough,” I said.

  I took a somewhat firmer grip on her shoulders and walked her backward toward one of my client chairs. She thought I was succumbing. I could feel her shoulders relax. I sat her down in my client chair and held her there. She raised her face with her eyes closed and her mouth open.

  “You and I are not going to have sex,” I said. “I don’t like that much better than you do, but it’s a fact.”

  She reached out and began to rub my thigh. I slapped her hand. The action was involuntary, but effective. She pulled her hand away and burst into tears. I went around my desk feeling completely idiotic and sat down, and breathed in and out as quietly as I could. She cried for a little while and rubbed her hand where I’d slapped it.

  “You hit me,” she said.

  “Not very hard,” I said.

  “It was too hard,” she said.

  “Hard is in the eye of the beholder, I guess,” I said, and wished I hadn’t said it quite that way.

  KC rubbed her hand some more, and sniveled a little. It didn’t seem to me like a good time to tell her that Louis Vincent was almost certainly the guy who was stalking her. Or that she was but one of a fairly long list of women he stalked. Perhaps there was another way to approach that problem.

  Then she said, “I don’t understand you, most men would jump at the chance to fuck me.”

  “Of course they would.”

  “Don’t you think I’m beautiful?” KC said.

  “Absolutely,” I said.

  “As beautiful as poopie old Susan?”

  “No less,” I said.

  “You’re not even married to her.”

  “I know,” I said.

  “I need a man to hold me.”

  “Maybe you just want one and think it’s need.”

  “What’s that mean?”

  I shrugged.

  “Just a thing to say.”

  “Well, I’ve been through hell,” KC said with a breathy sorrowful catch in her voice.

  I nodded.

  “And I don’t need a lot of holy-than-thou crap from some guy I’ve hired.”

  “I think that’s holier,” I said, “holier than thou.”

  “And don’t patronize me.”

  Lucky I was a liberated guy and perfectly correct in my sexual attitudes or I might have said something under my breath about women.

  “KC,” I said. “I’m trying, with some difficulty, and against most of my genetic programming, to avoid sex with you in a pleasant fashion. Maybe it can’t be done. Maybe the closest I can get to it is to patronize you.”

  She sat and looked at me and thought about that. She was gorgeous. I knew virtue was its own reward, but sometimes I wondered if the same might be true of vice.

  “So tell me about Susan,” she said. “What is it she does to make you like this?”

  “It has to do with love, I think.”

  “But how does she get you to do what she wants?”

  “She doesn’t,” I said. “I want to do what she wants.”

  “But she must do something.”

  “What she does,” I said, “is she tries not to want me to do things I don’t want to do.”

  “I’m serious,” KC said.

  “Me too,” I said.

  KC stared at me, she crossed her bare legs and stared some more. Finally she said, “I don’t get it.”

  “No,” I said. “You don’t.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY
-FOUR

  I took a rosewood-paneled elevator up to the top floors of the State Street Building where Hall, Peary flourished. There were five guys in striped shirts and red suspenders riding up with me. For a guy who kept all his money in his wallet, I was spending a lot of time with stockbrokers. When I went into Louis Vincent’s big corner office I closed the door behind me. Louis was contemplating his computer screen, breathless with adoration.

  “Hello there,” I said. Spenser, the genial gumshoe.

  Vincent looked up.

  “Oh, hi. Come on in, or, well, you are in, aren’t you.”

  “I bring you greetings,” I said, “from KC Roth, and Meredith Teitler, and a woman in Hingham whose name I do not know, but whose significant other is a large fierce man named Al who says he will remove your head if he ever encounters you.”

  “What the hell are you talking about?” Vincent said.

  “Don’t dick around with this, Vincent. You’ve stalked a number of women in the past and you are stalking KC Roth currently.”

  He got to his feet.

  “You’re crazy,” he said.

  I walked around the corner of his desk and put a good short left hook in under his rib cage on the right side. He gasped and staggered back, and began flailing at me with both hands. He was so inept that his fists weren’t fully closed and if he’d hit me it would have been more of a slap than anything else. But he didn’t hit me. It had been a long time since somebody who punched like he did had hit me. I hit him again, same punch, same place, and he gasped again.

  Then he hollered, “Betty.”

  I punched him in the solar plexus with my right hand and he sagged. He tried to yell Betty again but he had too little breath. Behind me the door opened.

  A woman’s voice said, “My God.”

  “Call cops,” Vincent gasped.

  I stepped away. He tried to straighten up, still struggling to get air in, and I clipped him on the jaw with a good professional right cross and he sat down hard on the floor and stayed there.

  “Stop it,” Betty screamed, “stop it.”

  “Done,” I said.

  Betty turned and ran toward her desk. Vincent was staring at me from the floor. He was about half functional.

  “Can you understand me?” I said.

  He nodded.

  “If anything even slightly annoying, anything at all happens to KC Roth, ever again, I will come back and knock every tooth out of your head.”

  He continued to stare.

  “And maybe I’ll tell Al where you are.” I could see that he heard me.

  “You understand that?” I said.

  He nodded very slightly. He was very pale, and he kept himself rigid as if any movement would make him disintegrate.

  “Feel free to explain to the cops why I punched you,” I said and turned and walked out of his office.

  Betty had hung up the phone. When she saw me she pointed me out to a couple of vigorous-looking young guys who were probably good at squash.

  “That’s him,” she said. “Don’t let him get away.”

  I didn’t feel like instructing them in the difference between scuffling and squash, so I smiled at them courteously and opened my coat so they could see that I was wearing a gun.

  “Let him get away,” I said.

  Which they did.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  Pearl and Susan and I were sitting in Susan’s large black Explorer in the parking lot of the Dunkin‘ Donuts shop on Route 1 in Saugus, eating donuts. Actually Susan and Pearl were sharing a donut and I was eating several, with coffee.

  “I got a call from KC Roth this morning,” Susan said.

  She sprinkled a little Equal into her decaffeinated coffee and swirled it with the little red swizzle that came with the coffee.

  “Swell,” I said.

  I liked the donuts they sold with the little handle on them. When you had finished the donut you still could eat the little handle and have the illusion that you’d gotten extra.

  “She says you’ve been hitting on her.”

  I finished my donut and drank some coffee to help it down.

  “And how did you respond?” I said.

  “I said that it seemed very unlike you.”

  “And she said?”

  “That apparently I didn’t know you as well as I thought I did.”

  “Well,” I said, “if I were going to hit on someone besides you, she’d be an early candidate.”

  “Yes, she is undeniably stunning,” Susan said. “But I’m pretty sure that I do know you as well as I think I do.”

  “Maybe better,” I said.

  “So I don’t want you to deny it,” Susan said. “Because I don’t believe you did it. But I’d be curious as to why she is telling me you did.”

  “She blandished me and I was unresponsive,” I said.

  “Blandished?”

  “Yes.”

  “As in blandishments?”

  “Yes.”

  “Are you sure that’s a word?”

  “It is now,” I said.

  “Tell me about her blandishments,” Susan said.

  So I did, graphically.

  “I don’t wish to hurt your feelings, but KC has always been something of a hot pants.”

  “Damn,” I said, “I thought maybe you had told her what a Roscoe I was in bed.”

  Susan shook her head and sipped some more decaf. “Your secret is safe with me,” she said.

  From the backseat Pearl nudged at my elbow as I was about to bite into a new donut.

  “Excuse me,” I said and broke off a piece and gave it to her.

  “KC and I have been friends a long time,” Susan said. “I would have hoped for a little better behavior.”

  “Maybe she’s different with men than she is with other women,” I said.

  “I’d say that was a given,” Susan said.

  “I don’t know why, and obviously I’m making some rather large intuitive leaps here, but she seems to be in bad need of male attention and she seems to need it from men she can be scornful of.”

  “Including you?” Susan said.

  “If I had, ah, come across,” I said. “Then she could have been scornful of me because I was unfaithful to you.”

  “Maybe that was part of your attraction, in addition to being a Roscoe, of course.”

  “This is your department,” I said, “but maybe it’s why she cheated on her husband. He seemed hard to scorn.”

  “Yes, Burt is quite admirable. How about her stockbroker?”

  “Easy to scorn.”

  “I of course understand some of that.”

  “You understand some of everything,” I said.

  Susan smiled and held her decaf up so Pearl could lap a little from the cup.

  “Yes we do,” she said. “How did your talk go with Louis Vincent? Did he admit it?”

  “Not exactly.”

  “Did he seem remorseful?” Susan said.

  “I think by the end of the discussion he felt some remorse.”

  “Does his remorse have any connection with the bruised knuckles on your right hand?”

  “It was a talking point,” I said.

  “Did you have to talk much?”

  “Awhile.” I said.

  “So how come there aren’t any other bruises on your knuckles.”

  “All the other talking was to the body,” I said.

  “Did you reach an agreement?”

  “We agreed that he would stop bothering KC.”

  “Leaving KC all the free time she needs,” Susan said, “to bother you.”

  “Exactly.”

  “Maybe I’ll talk with her.”

  “And say what?”

  “And say that if she doesn’t stop fucking around with my honey bun, she’ll be sleeping with the fishes.”

  “You shrinks know just the right thing,” I said.

  “Yes,” Susan said. “We do.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

 
One of the people who’d been outed by OUTrageous was a television reporter named Rich Randolph. I sat with him in his cubby inside the newsroom at Channel Three, next door to the news set.

  “I wasn’t exactly in the closet,” he said. “But I wasn’t, you could say, broadcasting it.”

  “Probably not the road to advancement,” I said.

  Randolph was slimmer than he looked on camera, with a good haircut, round, gold-rimmed glasses, and a sharp-edged face.

  “Hell, glasses put you at a disadvantage.”

  “And well they should,” I said.

  He glanced at me for a moment and then smiled.

  “Nothing,” he said, “is too trivial for local television.”

  “Did you know Prentice Lamont?” I said.

  “He the guy ran the magazine?”

  “Yes.”

  “No, I didn’t know him. I saw his name on the masthead. Somebody, I assume it was he, wrote me an unsigned letter saying that I was scheduled to be outed in the whatever date issue of OUTrageous, unless I wished to make other arrangements, and included a phone number. I called the number and I said what sort of arrangements, and he said, financial. And I said you mean you’ll take money not to out me? And he said, yes, and I told him to go fuck himself, and hung up. About two weeks later I was out.”

  “Sounds like you passed on a good piece of investigative reporting.”

  “I did,” Randolph said. “It was also my life, and I thought maybe I can just sit tight and it’ll blow over. I mean who ever heard of OUTrageous, anyway? I thought they might be bluffing, and if they weren’t I thought no one read the damned thing.”

  “Unless they backed it up,” I said, “and made sure somebody saw it.”

  “The station manager got a copy in the mail.”

  “How’d that work out?”

  “He was hurt,” he said, “that I hadn’t leveled with him. The sonovabitch. Like he’s telling me about his sex life.”

  “But he didn’t fire you.”

  “Hell no. The union would be on them like ugly on a warthog. The PR fallout would swamp him, and he knows it.”

  “He taking any action?” I said.

  Randolph shrugged. “You watch the news on this station?”

  “No,” I said.

  “Well, if you did, you might next see me covering a fashion show.”