Chance

by Robert B. Parker

  Bernard tipped his hat forward a little lower over the bridge of his nose and we left him getting a drink at the bar in the hotel lobby. Probably waiting for Debbie.

  It was about 11:30 and Convention Center Drive was the road less traveled at this time of night in Vegas. Hawk and Bibi and I were nearly the only people on the street, as we walked west toward the Strip in the neon-tinged late-night twilight, which was about as dark as it gets in Vegas. If Bibi was glad to see us, she had mastered her emotions completely. She had not spoken since Hawk had brought her into the lobby. And as she walked between us she seemed to be dwindling inside her silence, as if eventually it would become so thick we couldn't find her.

  "Told her we ain't working for Marty," Hawk said.

  I nodded.

  "We've been looking very hard for you," I said.

  She gave no indication that she'd heard me.

  "Mostly we were worried about you. You've had a lousy life for quite a while."

  We got to the Strip and turned left, heading south toward The Mirage. On the Strip the dry desert night was full of people and cars and lights, thick with the smell of exhaust fumes and cigarette smoke, and deodorant spray and hair spray and mixed drinks and cologne and desperation. There was a lot of energy on the Strip but it was feverish, the kind of energy that makes you sleepless, that makes you drive too fast, and chain-smoke, and drink heavy. The Strip was choked with people in dogged search of fun, looking for the promise of Vegas that had brought them all from Keokuk and Presque Isle and North Platte. It wasn't like it was supposed to be.

  It wasn't the adventure of a lifetime, but it had to be. You couldn't admit that it wasn't. You'd come too far, expected too much, planned too long. If you stayed up later, played harder, gambled bigger, looked longer, saw another show, had another drink, stretched out a little further…

  "I was in Fairhaven High School a few days ago," I said to Bibi.

  "Nice-looking old building. Looks like a real high school, doesn't it."

  She didn't respond. As we walked through the crowd, people would occasionally stare covertly at Hawk.

  "I met your friend Abigail," I said.

  Nothing.

  "Abigail Olivetti," I said.

  "Hey, Abbey, where's the party?"

  Bibi was silent.

  "Almost twenty years ago," I said.

  Bibi started to cry. Nothing dramatic, just some tears silently on her face. She made no move to wipe them away.

  "Seems a long way back, doesn't it?" I said.

  She nodded.

  "Didn't work out so good," I said.

  She shook her head.

  "We might be' able to make it work better," I said.

  She stopped walking and stood crying in the middle of the sidewalk in front of the Desert Inn. I put my arm around her shoulder. She stiffened and turned stiffly toward me and stood stiffly against me so she could cry on my chest. Hawk appeared to pay no attention, but I noticed he had moved in front of us so that he shielded her with his body and people couldn't see her crying.

  We stood like that for a while and finally she stopped crying, though she made no visible effort to do so, and pulled stiffly away from my chest. She seemed no longer in concealment, as if the crying had revealed her and she had nothing left to hide.

  "I met Marty my senior year," she said.

  "Everybody was scared of him but me."

  We began to walk again. The sidewalk was crowded but people seemed to give us room. When you walked with Hawk you never got jostled.

  "Where'd you go when you got to L.A.?" I said.

  "I had a friend in Oceanside, Dianne Lalli, I went to see her."

  "From high school?" '"Yes. I don't have any friends after high school. Did you really see Abbey?"

  "Yes, she's married, three kids, lives in Needham, works in a bank."

  "What's her husband do?"

  "Works for the telephone company."

  Bibi nodded gently.

  "Mine don't," she said.

  "You stay with Dianne Lalli all this time?"

  "No, her husband didn't like me staying there. I went up to Portland for a little while, then I came here."

  "Why here?"

  "Anthony."

  "You think he's here?"

  "I know he's here. He's got an answering service. It was how we used to get in touch, you know, when he couldn't call me at Marty's house, and I couldn't call him at Shirley's."

  "And you called it."

  "And he called me back. From here. The Mirage. He said I should come and join him."

  "After he run out on you that way," Hawk said, "wouldn't think you'd want him back."

  "I don't. It's why I'm staying where I'm staying," Bibi said.

  "He's crazy. He's got to finish what he started. He's got to lose everything."

  "He know you're here?"

  "Not yet."

  "So why'd you come?" I said.

  "The money he took was ours."

  "Where'd you get it?" I said.

  "He skimmed it from Gino and Julius," Bibi said.

  "For us. It was for us to start a new life."

  "Whose idea was that?"

  Bibi almost laughed.

  "The new life was mine. The funny thing is the skimming idea was Shirley's. She got him to start holding out on Julius, said even if her father caught him he wouldn't do anything, because he was her husband."

  "She wanted to get out of the house?"

  "Guess so," Bibi said.

  "Away from her mother, Anthony says."

  "Was supposed to be a new life for her too," I said.

  "How'd Gino get involved."

  "New lives are hard," Bibi said, "aren't they. Anthony liked the deal. He figures he's doing Julius. He may as well do Gino. Only this time he got caught."

  "By Marty," I said.

  She looked surprised.

  "How'd you know," Bibi said.

  "I'm a trained detective," I said.

  "And instead of blowing the whistle, Marty cut himself in."

  "Yes."

  "And he became Anthony's partner, which is how you met Anthony."

  "Yes."

  She spoke so easily and without affect that it was hard to realize that she was telling me most of what I'd been trying to find out since Julius and Shirley came to hire me.

  "And Marty met Shirley," I said.

  "Marty knew Shirley?"

  "Yeah," I said.

  "They used to meet regularly."

  "Was he sleeping with her?"

  "I don't think so."

  "Lucky for her," Bibi said.

  "Was the deal more than just money?"

  "I don't know, it might have been."

  "Was Marty happy being number two for Gino?"

  "No. He said Gino was a pansy, and he hated taking orders from him."

  I looked at Hawk.

  "He using Anthony as his inside man in Julius's outfit," Hawk said.

  "While he was funding a war chest," I said.

  Hawk nodded slowly.

  "Could be," he said.

  "And then, as luck would have it," I said, "here came the Russians."

  "Marty a glasnost guy," Hawk said.

  "I don't know anything about Russians," Bibi said.

  "No reason you should," I said to Bibi.

  "And since they all in on this scam together, he takes up with Shirley," Hawk said.

  "To keep track of Anthony, like he used Anthony to keep track of Julius."

  "What I like is how Marty thought he was running Anthony," I said.

  "Only he wasn't. Anthony got enough money to get away from Shirley and he took off with Marty's war chest. And Marty's wife."

  "And Marty left with Shirley rolling around loose on the deck worried about her man," Hawk said.

  "So he had to kill her when she showed up out here," I said.

  "Because she knew what was going on, or enough of it to cause him trouble."

  "And gonna have to kill her,
" Hawk said, nodding at Bibi, "and he gonna have to kill Anthony."

  "If we're right," I said.

  "We might be," Hawk said.

  "Yeah," I said.

  "We're due."

  "I don't follow what you're saying," Bibi said.

  "Did he kill Shirley?"

  "I like him for it," I said.

  "It makes some sense."

  "I don't know why."

  "If we're right," I said, "Marty's trying to run the whole mob scene in Boston. You don't have to know why we think so, just remember the part about how he has to kill you too."

  "That's not news," Bibi said.

  "He'd have killed me anyway, one way or another. In some ways he already has."

  I nodded.

  "I don't know if I can ever love anybody again. I don't know if I can ever be with a man again."

  "That can be fixed," I said.

  "First though we got to fix this."

  "I'm going to get my money back before Anthony loses it," Bibi said.

  "It's mine, and, in God's truth, I got nothing else to care about."

  "Care about yourself," I said.

  "Getting my money back is the best I can do," Bibi said.

  "How you going to get the money?" Hawk said.

  "If there's any left."

  "Whatever he has left, I want," Bibi said.

  "However I can get it.

  He took everything I ever had."

  "Like your style," Hawk said as if he were thinking out loud.

  "Want some help?" I said.

  "I don't want any help from any men," she said.

  "Even you. I know you're a good man. Both of you are good men. But I have to stay clear of men for a while."

  "Help is help," I said.

  "Regardless of the source."

  "I never met a man that cared about me. I know you do, but I can't react to it, you know? Not now anyway. And even you are trying to use me to nab Anthony."

  "I want to make sense out of Shirley Ventura's murder and I want to see to it that you don't get hurt," I said.

  "When you went to Portland, how'd you get there?"

  "Train."

  "How'd you pay for the ticket."

  "I had mon…" She paused as she remembered.

  "Okay, you gave me money and I ran away on you. I know. But you need to understand. I've been exploited all my life by men. I'm not able to trust you. I have to do what I can do by myself. I got a right."

  "Affirmative action," Hawk murmured.

  "I never been on my own before. I married Marty when I was seventeen to get out of the house. Didn't work out. Fifteen years later I took up with Anthony to get away from Marty. That didn't work out, either. I been looking for men to take care of me all my life, and I don't want to do it anymore."

  "Why were you in such a hurry to get out of the house?"

  "My old man was an asshole."

  "And so were his replacements," I said.

  Bibi stared at me for a moment.

  "Well, that's over," she said finally.

  "No more assholes."

  "So much for us," Hawk murmured.

  "Must be kind of scary," I said.

  "On your own all at once."

  "Yeah, it is, but no scarier than my life has been. I know you want to help me, and as much as I can, I appreciate it. I'm grateful. I am. But damnit I can't depend on a man, even you."

  "It's a good thing to change," I said.

  "But it's kind of hard to do alone. And it's kind of hard to do all at once."

  "This is the first step. Don't you get it? I can't turn to you. I want to. For God's sake I'm scared to death Marty will find me. But I simply cannot."

  I looked at Hawk.

  "I don't think I'm winning this conversation," I said.

  " Tears not."

  "Okay," I said.

  "You want to go back to your hotel?"

  Bibi was quiet for a bit, looking at me.

  "Yeah," she said, "I do."

  "Would you prefer to walk back alone?"

  She took a deep inhale.

  "Yes," she said.

  "I would."

  "You know if Marty can find you, he'll kill you. Anthony too, I think, if he had the balls."

  "He doesn't," Bibi said.

  "Can never be sure," I said.

  Bibi looked at me grimly with her lips clamped shut.

  "Okay," I said and made a be-my-guest gesture with my hand and stepped aside. Bibi began slowly to walk back along Las Vegas Boulevard toward Convention Center Drive. After a few steps she turned.

  "I get some money," she said, "I'll pay you back."

  "Sure," I said.

  She went a few more steps back along the empty street. Again she stopped and turned.

  "I appreciate what you've done, both of you."

  "Glad to help," I said.

  CHAPTER 49

  She kept walking. Hawk and I watched her as she went past the Desert Inn and turned right onto Convention Center Drive. "We spend weeks looking for her," Hawk said.

  "And a lot of dough. And we fly three thousand miles and when we find her she gives you a speech and you let her walk."

  "Always had a soft spot for feminism," I said.

  "Of course," Hawk said.

  "Me too. Wouldn't be correct, I suppose, if we sort of kept an eye on her while we having it?"

  "Paternalistic and exploitive," I said.

  "What if she don't spot us?" Hawk said.

  "Then it's fine," I said.

  The rest of the way back to The Mirage, Hawk and I had a lengthy discussion as to who would tail Bibi in the morning and who would sleep in. My argument was that early rising was in his genes from all those ancestral generations of chopping cotton before the dew had faded. He felt that this was a racist stereotype.

  He decried racial stereotyping, and explained to me that I was a white-bread paddy with a plantation mentality. I argued that, being of Irish descent, I had no mentality at all, plantation or otherwise. And he insisted that no one was too stupid to be a bigot. He had me there, but I didn't admit it and when we got to The Mirage we stopped in the lobby and flipped a coin and he lost.

  As it turned out the argument was aimless, because forty-five minutes after I got to my room the phone rang and it was Bibi.

  "I'm in the lobby," she said.

  "Marty's here."

  She sounded out of breath.

  "In the lobby?"

  "No, I saw him in the lobby of my hotel when I came back from walking with you."

  "He see you?"

  "No, I ran all the way here."

  "Room ten twenty-four," I said.

  "Come up."

  I had my pants on, and a pair of loafers, when she rang my doorbell. Being a careful person I picked up my gun before I opened the door, but she was alone.

  "Lock it," she said when she came in. Her breath was still coming heavy, and her face was flushed.

  "I ran all the way here," she said.

  "Put the chain on."

  I pulled the spread up over the unmade bed. When I'm not with Susan I don't need a suite. The room was all there was. No view of the volcano.

  "Sit down," I said.

  "Want a drink?"

  She shook her head. She continued to stand.

  "Was Marty alone?" I said.

  "The little man was there, that was with you tonight. I saw him through the door and never went in. There might have been other men too. The minute I saw Marty I turned and ran."

  "Bernard J. Fortunate," I said.

  "The little man that was with you?"

  "Yeah," I said.

  "Looks like he sold you twice."

  She had her arms folded and she walked back and forth in the small room, staying away from the window though we were on the tenth floor.

  "You mean he called Marty?"

  "I'll bet," I said.

  "Double the profit, double the fun."

  "I'm scared."

  "Don't
blame you."

  "I don't know what to do."

  "Stay here," I said.

  "That's the first thing. Don't take off on me."

  "I feel so stupid after all that stuff I said tonight about men."

  "What you said made sense," I said.

  "You're just not quite ready to do it all without help. Nobody does it all without help.

  And this is my kind of help."

  She stared at me.

  "Without your shirt on… I didn't realize. You're a big man, aren't you."

  "Yeah, and you don't need to slip into the admiring-woman disguise," I said.

  "I'll help you regardless."

  "I wasn't… maybe I was. But Marty is a huge man, and he's so vicious. Nobody can stop Marty."

  "Hawk and I will stop him," I said.

  "You're going to be fine."

  "Will you kill him?"

  "We'll see," I said.

  "Kill him," she said.

  Her voice was soft and flat, and earnest.

  "You have to kill him," she said.

  "It's the only way."

  "We'll play it as it lays," I said.

  "If you kill him," she said, "I'll do anything you want me to do."

  "No charge," I said.

  "Either way. I'll go to Hawk's room and you can sleep here."

  She shook her head.

  "I can't be alone," she said.

  "Okay. I'll put the mattress on the floor. One of us can sleep on it and one on the box spring."

  "That's very nice of you."

  "Yeah. And listen. The way you were talking earlier was the right way. There's things some people can do and other things other people can do, and if you need help, it doesn't mean you're dependent. So don't be dependent. Stay with no-more-assholes."

  She nodded, still clenched inside her folded arms, still avoiding the tenth-story window. I unmade the bed, dragged the mattress onto the floor, folded the spread over to serve as padding on the box spring, found an extra blanket in the closet, put a pillow on the mattress, and left a pillow on the box spring.

  "Your choice," I said.

  "I can't just lie down and go to sleep," she said.

  "You can do whatever you like," I said.

  "All I want to know is when you do lie down, where you wish to lie."

  "I don't have any pajamas."

  "Me either," I said.

  She still stood, hugging herself, looking like she didn't know what to do. I looked at the box spring. It was probably less comfortable than the mattress.

  "The bathroom's there. Use anything you find in there. I got a*: big day tomorrow, wrestling with Marty and such, and I need my rest."