Robert B Parker - Spenser 23 - Chance

by Chance(lit)

  "Why does she stay in the room all the time?" I said.

  "She's kind of shy."

  "Shy?"

  "Yeah. She's sort of, ah, intimidated by the casino scene and all.

  She stays in the room, reads, watches TV."

  "And eats three meals a day off the room service menu? And never goes to a show? Or shops? Or swims?"

  Anthony was quiet.

  "I think we need to talk with her, Anthony."

  "Okay, but not right now, you know? I'm missing quality time at the table."

  "Anthony," I said.

  "Your wife's been killed. You are a suspect.

  When the cops questioned me, I lied about several things, including you. I got to know what's what before they find you so I can save my ass, and maybe yours as needed."

  "Me? I didn't kill her. I been playing blackjack since I got here."

  "She was killed sometime prior to six A.M. this morning. Hawk left you at four-fifteen this morning. That's an hour and forty-five minutes when you could have done it."

  "For cris sake I was in my room, Bibi can tell you."

  "My point exactly," I said.

  "Let's go and ask her."

  Anthony sat for a moment without moving. Then he got up from the bar, glanced regretfully at the hot blackjack table, and we headed for the elevators.

  At his room, Anthony unlocked the door with his room key, opened it just enough to stick his head through.

  "Beebs, you decent?" he yelled.

  I could hear a television laugh track giggling and guffawing inside the room. I heard a woman's voice, and then Anthony opened the door wider and we went in.

  Mr. & Mrs. Davis had a one-bedroom suite. They were not neat.

  The room service wagon was still in the living room, bearing the disorganized remnants of cereal and toast, orange juice and coffee.

  There were shirts and panty hose, socks and blouses all over the room. The luggage was open on the floor, half unpacked. A hair drier lay on the coffee table. An uncapped toothpaste tube lay on the bar with some toothpaste drooling out. Through the open door to the bedroom I could see that the bed hadn't been made up yet.

  Sitting on it, fully dressed and made up, was a red-haired woman with pale skin and a faint scatter of freckles. She had a parenthesis-shaped scar a little to the right of, and below, her right eye.

  Her hair was long and thick. She wore a green dress with some sort of white print in it, and white sling-back heels. She stood and came out of the bedroom.

  "Beeb, this is Spenser," Anthony said.

  "Spenser, Bibi."

  "Bibi what?" I said.

  "Anderson," Anthony said. Unfortunately, Bibi said, "Davis" at the same time.

  There was a white leather woman's handbag on the dresser, a big one, the kind you hang off your shoulder. I picked it up and looked in.

  "Hey," Anthony said.

  "What the hell are you doing."

  "You can't even agree on what her name is, I thought I'd look for a clue."

  There was a dark red compact, some loose tissues, a pair of radiant blue Oakley sunglasses, some bills and coins, a bottle of Advil, some keys, a fat-free granola bar, some lipstick in a dark red tube, two tampons, and a wallet. Anthony looked like he wanted to take the purse away from me, and knew he couldn't so he settled for standing around wishing he could. Bibi said nothing and showed no evidence that she cared one way or another if I rummaged in her purse.

  "You got no right to look in there," Anthony said.

  I took out the wallet. It had credit cards in it and a Massachusetts driver's license. The picture on the license was Bibi. There was a Medford address, and the name on the license was Beatrice Anaheim.

  "Marty's wife?" I said.

  "Yes," she said.

  "Leapin' lizards," I said.

  CHAPTER 22

  "Okay," Anthony said, "now you know."

  "Now I know."

  "It's not what you think. We love each other."

  "That's what I thought," I said.

  "I finish here, we're going someplace, get married."

  "How's Marty feel about this?" I said.

  Bibi had her arms folded across her stomach as if she were sick, or cold. She squeezed herself a little tighter when I asked the question.

  "Marty don't matter," Anthony said.

  "We clean out this place and we're gone."

  "How do you feel about it?" I said to Bibi.

  She shook her head.

  "She feels great about it," Anthony said.

  "Either of you worried that Marty Anaheim might be jealous and try to find you and, ah, attempt to correct your behavior?"

  Bibi seemed to be getting colder; she hugged herself tighter.

  "That's what I got you and Hawk for," Anthony said.

  I passed that by without comment.

  "Anthony with you last night?" I said to Bibi.

  She nodded.

  "All night?"

  She nodded.

  "From midnight to four-fifteen?" I said.

  She nodded.

  "No," Anthony said.

  "Bibi, you remember I was playing blackjack until four-fifteen. Hawk saw me. I was with you from four fifteen on."

  Bibi nodded.

  "Sure," she said.

  "That's right."

  "Isn't that swell," I said.

  "You through now, man. I gotta get back to the table before it goes cold."

  "Sure," I said.

  "Hawk's not there. So stay in full view."

  "You think Marty's here?"

  "Better to act like he might be," I said.

  "Aren't you going to come with me?"

  "I'll stay and talk for a while with Mrs. Anaheim," I said.

  "Don't call me that," Bibi said.

  "Man, you're supposed to be guarding me."

  "I was supposed to be bringing you back to your wife," I said.

  "Well, that's over," Anthony said.

  I stood. Bibi sat. Anthony looked at me and at the door and at his watch. He shifted from one foot to the other.

  "You coming?" he said.

  "Nope."

  "Man, the table's getting cold on me while we stand here."

  I waited. Anthony looked at Bibi.

  "I got to get to the table," he said.

  She nodded. Anthony looked back at me.

  "Yeah, sure. Okay. I'll be right there at the tables. Nobody's gonna try something right there, in the middle of the casino."

  I smiled encouragingly. Anthony shifted again and then headed for the door.

  "I'll be playing," he said.

  The door closed behind him and the ornate room was quiet. Bibi sat on the couch looking at me. I glanced around the room. There was nowhere to sit without moving a pile of clothing. Bibi didn't seem to care if I stood or sat.

  "Want some coffee or something?" she said.

  "I can call down."

  "No," I said.

  "Why don't we go downstairs and have lunch."

  "What if somebody sees me?"

  "Bibi," I said, "somebody killed Shirley Ventura Meeker in a vacant lot a half mile down the Strip."

  "Who did it?"

  "I don't know, but it makes everything different. A lot of people are going to see you before this thing gets straightened out."

  "This thing?"

  "This thing," I said.

  "Whatever it is. Let's eat."

  I put my hand out to help her up. She ignored it and stood and hesitated and then went out the door ahead of me. She never said a word down in the elevator, across the casino, and into the restaurant, where, only this morning, Susan and I had eaten breakfast together. I looked at my watch. She'd be landing in about an hour.

  She'd stop at Henry's, get Pearl, and go home. She'd feed Pearl, unpack and hang everything up carefully, iron things that had wrinkled, take a bath, put on the pajamas she usually wore when she slept without me, get in bed with Pearl, have a half cup of frozen chocolate yogurt sweet
ened with aspartame, and watch a movie. Pearl would burrow under the covers and then Susan would fall asleep with the television still on.

  "Hey, Boston," the waiter said, "how ya doin?"

  It was Bob from Dorchester. Bibi ordered a glass of white wine.

  I had decaf. Bibi asked for a cheeseburger and fries. I ordered something called a Roman salad. I didn't know what it was, but Vegas was very taken with ancient Rome, and I wanted to be with it.

  "What do you want to talk about?" Bibi said when Bob went away.

  "You."

  "Oh God," Bibi said.

  "You know how many times I've heard that line?"

  "Tell me about yourself."

  "Yeah. You know what it means?"

  "Sometimes it means tell me about yourself," I said.

  "Mostly it means, "Let's fuck."" "Tell me about you and Marty and Anthony," I said.

  Bob brought the decaf and white wine. I looked at Bibi. She was a handsome woman with very big greenish eyes, and a wide mouth.

  There was very little life in the eyes. Besides the scar under her right eye, there was some thickening to her nose, not much, but a little the way fighters sometimes get it. A little like mine. Her teeth were white and even and might have been capped. There was about her the quality, almost the aroma, of sexuality. Susan always C H A it would ask how I knew. I could never tell her exactly, except that when I'd seen it before and put it to the test, I'd nearly always been right.

  "What's to tell," she said.

  "I was with Marty, now I'm with Anthony."

  "How was it with Marty?"

  She shrugged.

  "Marty's a pretty dangerous guy," I said.

  "He's a pig," she said.

  "Yes, he is. That why you left him?"

  "Yes."

  "Why'd you marry him?"

  Bob returned with the Roman salad and the cheeseburger. The Roman salad looked very much like a tossed salad except that it had green olives and wedges of artichoke heart in with the cherry tomatoes and shredded carrots and red leaf lettuce. Bibi took a small bite of her cheeseburger.

  "Was he a pig when you married him?" I said.

  Bibi chewed carefully and swallowed. She picked up a French fry and ate it.

  "He's always been a pig," she said.

  "But I didn't always know it."

  "He treat you right?" I said.

  "He beat the shit out of me," she said.

  Everything she said was flat and offhanded as if nothing mattered more than anything else, and she was kind of bored to have to tell me.

  "At least he's consistent," I said.

  "I think he liked to do it," she said.

  "I think it gave him a thrill."

  "He do it often?"

  "Yeah."

  "And you didn't leave."

  "No."

  I nodded and took a bite of my Roman salad. Bibi had stopped eating and sat staring past me as if she were looking at her own past, just beyond my left ear.

  "I didn't have any money," she said.

  "He kept it all. I didn't even have a credit card. He'd give me money for food shopping once a week, two hundred dollars, and he'd check the register receipt when I came home and make me give him the change."

  I didn't say anything. You do it long enough and you get a sense when somebody is at the start of a long talk. The best thing is to give them space and wait for them to fill it.

  "I didn't have a credit card. I didn't have anyplace to go, even if I had one. He wouldn't let me work. You know I never had a job? I married Marty right after high school."

  Bibi shook her head. Her face was blank but there was painful self-mockery in her voice.

  "Fairhaven High School, nineteen seventy-seven, most congenial. Met him down the Cape, bar in Falmouth we used to go to 'cause they didn't card you. He picked me up. He was dangerous.

  Everybody was scared of him, but me. I thought he was exciting, you know? A real man."

  Bibi stared down silently at her cheeseburger for a time.

  "You got married right away?"

  "Three months."

  "Kids?"

  She made a sound that had it been less bitter might have been a laugh.

  "Marty didn't want kids. Didn't want my figure get ruined, he said. I think he didn't want to share me with a kid, you know?"

  "Well," I said.

  "Your figure didn't get ruined."

  She gave me a little automatic smile to acknowledge the compliment.

  "Let me join a health club, aerobics, body shaping, that stuff;

  Marty said he liked me looking good."

  Bob came by and poured a little more decaf in my cup. I looked at it gloomily. It was better than nothing. It was not, on the other hand, better than an Absolut martini on the rocks with a twist. And the more Bibi Anaheim talked about her marriage, the more I wanted the martini.

  "He used to like to punch me around," she said.

  "And then have sex. Called it making up."

  I nodded.

  "He had a lot of trouble," Bibi said, "getting it up, you know?

  I'm not sure he could get it up, he didn't rough me up first."

  "Probably wasn't pleased that you knew that."

  "No, he wasn't. Said it was my fault. Said he had no trouble with the whores."

  "Probably because they were whores," I said.

  She shook her head impatiently.

  "I don't know anything about that," she said.

  "He used to go to the whores a lot. Good. Keep him away from me. Bastard gave me the clap once."

  I was quiet. She sat thinking back, looking past me at the lush artifice of the Las Vegas restaurant and probably not seeing it.

  "And then Anthony came along," I said after a while.

  "Funny thing," she said.

  "Marty introduced us. He never did that, you know, but he introduced me to Anthony. Figured Anthony was safe, I guess. He's not a tough guy like Marty. And he was married to Julius Ventura's daughter. I guess Marty never thought Anthony would be the one."

  "He was a friend of Marty's?"

  "Marty had a lot of guys hang around him. I don't think he had any friends. Everybody was scared of him."

  "So what was his relationship with Anthony?"

  She sat staring past me as if she hadn't heard me and then her eyes came slowly onto my face.

  "You scared of Marty?"

  "No."

  She kept her eyes on me for a while. Then she nodded her head slowly.

  "No, maybe you're not," she said, still looking at me.

  "But you should be."

  I waited.

  "Marty and Anthony had some deal going," she said, finally.

  "Do you know what it was?"

  "No."

  "Was Gino involved?" I said.

  "I don't think so."

  "I assume the deal is now off," I said.

  She nodded.

  "Marty finds out you're here, what happens?" I said.

  "He'll kill Anthony. Probably with his hands. Marty likes that.

  And he'll take me home and beat the shit out of me and it'll be like it was. Except this time he'll probably hurt me worse."

  "We'll have to see to it that he doesn't do that," I said.

  "Can Anthony stand up to him?"

  "Oh, God no," Bibi said.

  "Nobody can."

  "Somebody can," I said.

  "You love Anthony?"

  She made the bitter laugh sound again.

  "Better than Marty."

  "And he was a way out," I said.

  "He was. Now it's all shot to hell," Bibi said.