by Dick Cluster
Alex sighed dramatically. To business, then. When the questioning about Scat and Caroline happened, he wanted it to be in Scat’s place, not here. Maybe she’d know something to search for, something Dennis MacDonald had missed. Maybe in that setting it would be harder for her to get up and walk out. Maybe he just wanted to collect some of those covetous looks on the way out of this room.
“Another hundred is all I’ve got, I’m afraid. I do have a condo. I’m hoping you could come see it now.”
To his surprise, Lena’s eyes widened with shock. As if some signal had gotten crossed, and he’d made an unexpectedly indecent proposal. His second thought was that he’d let slip out whose condo he was really taking her to. Then he realized she was seeing something over his shoulder, and turned to see it too. He saw Natalie storming— there wasn’t any word for it— across the room. She wasn’t yelling, but she might as well as have been. Her arms were swinging like clock pendulums and her purse flailed out like a double-bladed ax she planned to take to someone’s backside. She flung the purse onto the table and stood over him, glaring. “So,” she hissed. “I see you got yourself a date, honey. Mind if I sit down?”
Lena’s shock died away, but her former interest did not return. She had pocketed the five twenty-dollar bills. She said to Alex, “I think maybe it would be better if I left.”
“Not on your life, honey,” Natalie insisted. “You’ve been paid for your time, and just ’cause he’s mine don’t mean he hasn’t got a right to make use of what he buys. I’m Natalie Cooper,” she added, extending her hand. “Alex’s wife.”
“Lena Hanson,” Alex said. He felt that Natalie was one step ahead of him, as always, but whatever she was up to, he ought to play along. “Look, darling,” he tried in a placating tone, “do we have to do this in public?”
“No,” Natalie said. “Why don’t the three of us all go home?” The face Lena turned to Natalie now was stone.
“What he buys, lady?” she said icily. “I’ve been paid for a dinner date, and now the dinner is done. It’s not in my job description to help clean up the mess.”
“I’m afraid it is,” Natalie said in a less emotional, more commanding tone. The voice, which had been shrill, dropped several tones, and it dropped a notch in volume as well. She pulled up a chair and checked to see that all eyes were carefully averted from the scene she had made. Then she extracted a flat plastic case from her purse. She flipped it open, quickly, in front of the kiss-me, picture-book face of Alex’s date. “You’ve got to answer some questions,” she said. “Homicide questions. Police.”
20. BLUE LIGHT DISTRICT
Alex closed Scat Johnston’s door behind the three of them. He let Natalie lead Lena Hanson into the living room while he turned right, into the kitchen, where he measured coffee and water into the electric pot. A percolator, he noted, not a drip machine; not quite state-of-the-art, Scat. The words Natalie had spoken in the car rumbled in his brain.
“You have the right to have a lawyer present,” she had intoned. “Anything you say may be used against you.” During the short ride, Lena had neither spoken nor availed herself of her constitutional right. When they had parked in the space closest to the path leading to Katahdin B-71, though, she had tugged her jacket tighter around her. It didn’t offer much protection against the New Hampshire night. Alex wondered what reassurance it gave her. “Coffee in a minute,” he called across the counter that separated living room from kitchen. “There’s sugar, but no cream, and the milk is sour, I’m afraid. There is Coffeemate, ingredients mono- and diglycerides.”
“Yeah, those,” Lena Hanson said. “Give me a cup of coffee with that.”
“Sugar,” Natalie said. She was on the couch with the brown cushions, under a poster showing two animals that might have been cats or horses or dragons. In Italian, it advertised an exhibit of paintings by Paul Klee. She seemed to Alex midway between a cat and a dragon herself: relaxed yet sinewy, like a cat, but this was a dry, confident, completely together one. Possessed of bluff and trickery like a dragon. He noticed the dull silver earrings with blue stones, like the ones street vendors sold in Harvard Square. It was faintly possible: Officer Natalie Cooper, young and bright, female and black, and a townie, Cambridge born and bred, the new breed of police. If that ID was real, though, why bother with the outraged-wife act to throw Lena off balance first? And why was Scat killed in her parents’ apartment, and why was she off keeping a rendezvous with Meredith and Maria and Alex at the time? And why was she simultaneously a student— well that could be, but why did Suzanne say she was a drug counselor? Alex shook his head and looked forward to the coffee, which might clear it. No, this had to be another act. There seemed to be a small epidemic of impersonating the Cambridge police. But whatever she was up to. most of those questions still pertained.
Lena sat on the reclining armchair, under a movie poster of Sophia Loren in a white peasant shirt, translucent and clinging because she and it had just come out of the sea. Lena had buttoned up her blouse and she kept pulling the suede jacket tighter. She also kept brushing imaginary crumbs off her pants. If Natalie was the dragon, who was this? The girl hero, hiding her dagger or amulet in one of those pockets of thin brown suede? Could she have killed Scat? And why? Alex maintained his post behind the counter, listening to the coffee begin to perk. He gave Natalie rope, for now.
“Alex could testify that you offered him sex for money,” Natalie said. “But of course we’ve got no interest in that. We’re investigating a homicide, Lowell Johnston, committed in Cambridge, Massachusetts. That’s where my jurisdiction begins and ends. What Johnston was into here may have some bearing. Your date, Alex Glauberman, is a private investigator hired by the family. He’s working with me on this.”
True in a sense, Alex thought, if not the family Natalie implied. He guessed that “hard cop/soft cop” was the party game. Soft cop was what he wanted, regardless. He asked across the counter, “What was the name of that story, by the way?”
“The title is ‘Eric Hermannson’s Soul.’ Eric gave Lena up when he got saved by a preacher. But later he escaped salvation thanks to a rich bitch from back East.” Lena didn’t smile as she said any of this, nor did she quote any more of the author’s cadenced words. “Was any of that bull about the mechanic and the librarian true?”
“Yes,” Alex said. “All of it. The truth always helps to disguise a lie.” He didn’t look at Natalie, who demanded, “What the hell are you two going on about?”
“American literature,” Lena said, turning to her. “I’ll talk to you, but that name, Lena Hanson, will have to do. No other name, no ID. When I get out, I don’t want you or anybody knowing where I went.” She waited, but Natalie neither agreed nor disagreed. Natalie opened her purse again and took a tape recorder out. It was the same kind Alex had bought yesterday. The last time he’d seen that one it had been in his room in the inn, with Suzanne. Lena watched her press the record button. She started to talk without waiting for a question.
“As I told your partner, Alex or Eric or George, I grew up in Dubuque. My parents saved up and sent me east to college. When the hog plant closed, they both lost cold, dirty jobs that you wouldn’t want, and I wouldn’t want if I could help it. But they were union jobs, steady, they paid good money, they put me where I was. Now all the packing houses are going non-union and moving further west. My folks couldn’t support me anymore. If anything, I knew I should be helping them. I told myself I would do this for a year, and then go back to school. I guess none of this sounds very original to you. Every hooker’s lament.”
Natalie asked, “Do your folks know where you are?”
“Where, not what. They’re churchgoers. I used to sing in the Lutheran choir, if you really want to know. They think I’m a cocktail waitress. They think that’s bad enough.”
Alex held up a hand to Natalie as he poured the brewed coffee into three of Lowell Johnston’s white cups, dishwasher bright, and then he set them on a black lucite tray. Natalie push
ed the pause button on the recorder and waited for him to come in and serve.
“You know whose place this is?” she asked Lena then.
“Whose it was, yeah.”
“Was he the pimp?”
“Please, Officer, no one uses words like that in this resort.” Lena looked sincere, but it may just have been part of the disguise, part of the more-sophisticated-than-thou attitude, something that went with the way her eyebrows were arched. “Scat was the personnel manager, you might say, but he worked for somebody else. His name is Paul Jakes, he’s a local. He’s the one who handles the Jericho town police. I guess you know they’ve been paid to look the other way.”
“Same as with the drugs,” Alex put in.
“That’s right. Jakes does the buying, I think. Scat does— did— the retailing in that operation, and in the other he does the personnel. Hiring and firing, labor disputes, that kind of thing.”
“And do you know anybody he got on the wrong side of?” Natalie asked. “Anybody that would be mad enough at him to kill him?”
“He wasn’t a very nice guy, but he wasn’t, like, violent or malicious. Somebody that he hooked on dope, that would be the most likely.”
“There’s been a suggestion,” Alex said, “that blackmail was involved. Is it possible he was in that business too? Hidden cameras, blackmailing your dates, threatening to send photos to their wives?”
Natalie smiled, but she only said, “Or whitemail, as the case may be.”
“Never when I was involved,” Lena shook her head. “The only picture-taking I know about—” She stopped suddenly, and involuntarily looked upstairs. “Well, yes, it was black- or white-mailing of a kind.”
“Yes?” Natalie made her voice deep and no-nonsense. Alex thought again of a cat, one that could simultaneously purr and gather itself to spring. A tiger, with that same unstudied, confident beauty, those same strong shoulders and the eyes that could become slits in the wide, easy-to-look-at face. Her boots— low, soft leather ones— tapped noiselessly against the carpet. But Lena stood her ground. She folded her hands, like a girl in Sunday school reciting. In lieu of a desk, she rested them on her knees.
“Scat was the talent scout, that was part of what he did. They wanted, you know, college women if possible, that would make the high-priced crowd happy. That wouldn’t stand out, either, as pros. It might seem to the clients and onlookers both like these guys really did just pick us up. Anyway, Scat had friends in Boston, in different colleges, people he went to prep school with. That’s how I got here. A guy I knew happened to mention it, kind of as a joke, kidding around.”
Kind of, Alex thought, maybe not quite. He remembered the conversation in the bar.
“I said I had a friend, and if my friend was interested, who would she call? He said he didn’t know, but he had a friend who might know who to call. It was all so transparent, but we pretended, you know. So I talked to this Lowell Johnston, the friend’s friend, on the phone. He said the procedure was to come up here for an audition.”
“Audition?”
“That’s the word he used, Officer, yes. He was right too. I mean, mostly they just want someplace they know they can shove their dick, or somebody female to be seen with, or both. But you have to be kind of an actress to make it work.”
“And the audition was…?”
“The audition turned out to be going to bed with Scat.” She kept her hands on her knees but jerked her head upward without trying to conceal the motion. “Up there, in his loft. He had this camera set up, on a stand, with a remote control. He said the picture-taking was to make sure we didn’t get flustered, embarrassed, self-conscious. Of course, it was something to hold over us too. He could threaten to send photos to our lovers or parents or whatever we had— in case we ever made noises like we were going to make any trouble for him.”
“Did he threaten you with exposure that way?”
Lena studied Natalie, looking for a putdown in her choice of words. She unclasped her hands and leaned forward, the stiff black strands of hair like spikes on a floating mine. It finally occurred to Alex that this was probably not her own hair, but a wig. He tried to picture her without the makeup, without the lipstick, her head close-cropped and fuzzy and blond. “I wasn’t in this to make trouble, Officer,” she said. “Does that sit okay with you?”
Natalie didn’t answer, but only looked at Alex, who finished his coffee and gathered the cups onto his tray. Then he handed Lena the picture of Caroline and Scat. “You mean pictures like that?”
“That would be one of the tamer ones,” Lena said. She handed it back, like something hot but not intensely so, something that could burn you only if you handled it too long. Her fingers were steady.
“Do you know who that is with him?” Alex asked.
She shook her head, but for once she didn’t seem to trust her voice.
“Ms. Hanson.” Natalie put on her own deep tone again. “This ain’t that big a place. You don’t mean to tell me you don’t know the other women who work in the same ring?”
“No, I don’t mean to. But she didn’t work. Some people must flunk the audition.” She looked Natalie straight in the eyes, her shoulders squared, the jacket hugging her, the pose a full color imitation of the young black-and-white Lauren Bacall. “Maybe she burst out laughing. The tricks don’t like that at all.”
“Well,” Natalie said. “Suppose we go back to who might want to kill Lowell Townsend Johnston. Could it have been for some kind of revenge? Did anybody ever get hurt in this operation, that’s what I want to know. Did anybody ever contract VD or AIDS, or have a pregnancy, an abortion? Commit suicide, or disappear— anything like that, anything at all?”
Yes, Alex realized, and the same question applied to Caroline’s death as well. If Caroline had been killed to keep her silent, what she knew had to be something worth killing over. Which could be money, but it could also be someone else’s death. He noticed that Natalie’s tone had gone silky soft. Lena stood and took the tray from him and carried it to the counter. Then she walked down the hallway and into the kitchen, where she slowly washed the cups, running the water loud. Finally she shut off the taps and turned to face Alex and Natalie, her fingers drumming on the Formica. They made a sound that indicated rapid thinking, a sound like far-off galloping hooves. She slowed down and just used one index finger and one middle finger, tap-tap, tap-tap, while she made up her mind.
“I didn’t know her,” she said, but her voice was more tired, less defiant. “But I know who she is. Who she was. Caroline Davis, the one he hit before he got killed. She came to talk to me once. She was worried about somebody who disappeared.”
Natalie crossed the room, not hurrying, and put the tape recorder down where it would be sure to catch Lena’s words. Standing paired over the kitchen counter like that, the two women did not seem so much like antagonists. More like they might be neighbors, roommates, or lovers. And Natalie didn’t follow with the obvious question: Who? Instead, from the profile Alex could see, she hesitated with half-open lips, the query not quite coming out. As if she’d been fishing, ever so calmly, but hadn’t expected the sharp tug or the wriggling thing that now showed itself on her hook.
So Alex said, “Yes, we thought that might be the case. Caroline had a friend who was one of your co-workers, isn’t that right?”
“Yeah. Nell. She quit suddenly, left, went on a trip to Europe with her loot. At least she sent a postcard from Spain, from Barcelona, that said so. Scat showed it to me. It wasn’t surprising— one day, I could see it coming, I might just get fed up, have to put down the part, try to go back to being just me.”
“But Caroline thought differently?”
“Caroline said it was strange she went so suddenly. Caroline got a letter from her, too, but she seemed to think the letter was strange. You know, how people read a forced confession or retraction, from a hostage or political prisoner or somebody that copped some kind of plea? And they say, ‘That just doesn’t sound like what s
o-and-so would write’? That’s what she said, this Caroline. And now she’s dead. Scat hit her. And somebody knifed him. I can see what brings you two here. Until you, though, nobody asked. Now the day I’m leaving is getting closer all the time.”
“Tell me about Paul Jakes,” Alex said. It was starting to make a certain kind of sense, but not yet enough. He felt separated from the action, so he came to stand next to Natalie, so he could look down at Lena Hanson instead of up.
“He’s a builder, a contractor. Scat used to pal around with him when he was a teenager, they say. I’ve been thinking anyhow that with Scat dead, this operation may be dead too. Paul’s probably outgrown it, doesn’t need it anymore.”
“Why not? What does he build?”
“I don’t know, but plenty. Stuff around here. That’s some of his trailers, building the new condos, Denali, Blue Ridge, Mount Hood. What do they say on them? ‘Jakes Construction— Jericho, New Hampshire— Boston, Mass.’ I guess he does work in Boston too.”
“Just like Graham Johnston,” Alex pointed out to Natalie. “An interesting connection to be followed up by the Cambridge police.”
“Is it?” Natalie asked. Whatever she thought, Alex’s question seemed to have helped her find her voice again. She referred the question to Lena. “Is there something between the Johnston family and this Paul Jakes?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know Paul, except to say hello. I bet he keeps clear of anything you could put your hands on. Listen, I’ve done you a favor— no lawyer, no delay, that was a favor I didn’t have to do. Do you know if, whoever searched this place first, they came across any more photos besides the one?”
