Life's Work

by Jonathan Valin

  “I think I have to,” I said.

  Driscoll shrugged. “It’s up to you.”

  I followed a short uncarpeted hallway decorated with posters of Dan Marino and Joe Montana into a small living room, furnished sparely in bright primary colors. A cherry-red sofa. A yellow beanbag chair. An electric-blue plastic parsons table between them. Some wicker-work hanging from the ceilings. An asparagus fern on the window sill. Another set of posters—John Travolta and Kris Kristofferson—on the walls.

  A second group of cops—forensic men, judging from the pop of flashcubes—were gathered in the bedroom. I walked over to the doorway and looked in. Then I went over to the couch and sat down heavily on the cushions. Bluerock came over to me. So did Driscoll.

  “The lab thinks it was Parks again,” Driscoll said, after a time.

  “That’s what they were meant to think,” I said, feeling the dullness, the lassitude of shock, spreading through me. Each part of me slowly falling asleep.

  “You all right, sport?” Bluerock said.

  I nodded, although I wasn’t all right.

  “It’s the same MO,” Driscoll went on. “And they found some physical evidence that ties Parks into it. It was Parks, all right. The crazy bastard.”

  I looked up at Bluerock. “You think it was Parks?”

  “You know what I think,” he said.

  “I’m going to need a drink,” I said to him.

  He raised me to my feet as if I were a child. “Can you make it downstairs?”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  But halfway down the stairs my legs gave way, and I had to lean on him until we got to the car.

  30

  WE WENT to the Busy Bee.

  I had three double Scotches in the space of a half hour, and I didn’t even feel drunk. Just dead inside. About halfway through the fourth Scotch, I did start to feel the liquor. Around the fifth, I got violently ill.

  I managed to make it to the john, but I didn’t make it to the stall. I threw up in one of the washbasins, banging my head on the porcelain sink and sliding to the floor. I sat there on the tiles until Bluerock came in and picked me up again.

  “This is getting to be a habit with you,” he said with a grimace. “Let’s go back to your place. Get some rest.”

  I shook my head. “We gotta go after them,” I said to him. “They killed her.”

  “I know it,” Bluerock said. “We’ll take care of them in the morning.”

  “Gotta go,” I said stupidly.

  Bluerock hauled me out of the john.

  Hank Greenburg, the bartender, took a look at me and made a face. “Christ, Harry, are you all right?”

  “He’s fine,” Bluerock said, as he guided me toward the door. “Just had a little too much to drink.”

  ******

  I woke up around seven the next morning, feeling nothing but a cold, vicious rage that covered every inch of me like a rank sweat. I didn’t even try not to think about Laurel, about the way she had looked when they’d finished with her. In fact, I fed myself on the image, turning it over in my mind again and again, until I was angry enough to butcher them the way they had butchered her. She’d been a greedy fool, greedier and more foolish than I had imagined. But for a few days I’d thought of her as mine.

  I wandered into the living room and found Bluerock sleeping on the couch. He woke up with a start as I passed by him, as if he had been singed by my shadow.

  We didn’t say a word to each other until I’d fixed some coffee.

  “Do you feel up to talking about her?” he said as we sat down across from each other in the living room.

  I nodded. “I feel up to more than that.”

  “You’ve got the look, all right,” he said with a nod. “Why do you think they did it?”

  “She knew something,” I said. “Something Kaplan was afraid of. She knew about the drugs. Maybe that was it.”

  “But why would he wait until now to shut her up?”

  “Why would he wait until now to go after Parks?” I said. “Obviously, C.W.’s murder changed something. What it was, I don’t know yet.”

  “She’d apparently been doing business with Walt, your friend Laurel,” Bluerock said.

  I’d been thinking about that, too, while I was making the coffee, thinking about what it was she could have sold to Walt that he couldn’t have gotten from anyone else. And I’d come up with one disturbing possibility.

  “I found out yesterday that she’d been lying to me about how much she knew,” I said. “She went with C.W. to the obstetrician. So she’d heard about what was wrong with the baby, and about what was wrong with Parks.”

  “What was wrong with Bill?” Otto said.

  It took me a second to realize that I hadn’t told him about Dr. Ashram or Dr. Phillips.

  “The steroids Bill had been taking had ruined C.W.’s baby. And they were killing Bill.”

  “Killing him?” Blue said, shocked.

  “Literally. His whole body was riddled with disease. And his mind had been affected too. He was pure madness, Blue, by the time of the murder. When Kaplan told him how C.W. had betrayed him back in December and what she was planning to do in court this week, it pushed him over the edge.”

  “What makes you so sure Walt didn’t kill her himself,” he said predictably, “and make it look like Bill had done it—just like he did with Laurel?”

  “You’re not listening to me, Blue,” I said. “The man was out of control. His life was out of control. Kaplan might have loaded the gun for him, but Bill pulled the trigger.”

  “Maybe so,” he said, although he didn’t sound convinced. In spite of all the evidence to the contrary, he hadn’t accepted the possibility that Bill Parks was a murderer. Otto was a brutal man, but like Bill, he had a sentimental streak, especially when it came to his friends. But then the two went together, as someone once said—brutality and sentiment.

  While he was mulling about Parks I went back to what I’d been saying about Laurel. “Kaplan had to have a source for his information about C.W.—someone to tell him her secrets. I thought at first that the source was Dice, but I’m beginning to think that it might have been Laurel.”

  Bluerock frowned. “She sold her friend out for money?” he said in a contemptuous voice.

  I nodded. “It’s ugly, I admit. But it wouldn’t have been out of character. And she was apparently a lot more privy to what was going on in that ranch house than she’d let on to me.”

  “Say that’s true,” Bluerock said. “That’s still not a good enough reason for Walt to kill her.”

  I didn’t think it was, either. I really didn’t know what to think about the second murder—until George DeVries called at eight thirty with the final piece of the puzzle.

  ******

  I had a feeling it was George when the phone rang. I snatched the receiver up eagerly, as if it were a call from home.

  “I think I got that information you wanted on Clayton, Harry-boy,” George said, after he’d said hello.

  “Tell me,” I said with appetite.

  “You won’t forget about the tickets? Or the popcorn-and-beer money?”

  “I won’t forget,” I said.

  “All right,” George said. “I don’t have the whole picture yet, but what it looks like is that Philly was playing a little dirty pool. He busted Parks just like we thought, with the help of Parks’s girlfriend. Only Parks wouldn’t play ball. No matter how hard Phil leaned on him, he wouldn’t agree to testify in court. So it shouldn’t be a total loss, Phil approaches this guy Kaplan on his own. He tells him he’s got Billy-boy in the bag, and that he’s going to send him away forever unless Kaplan agrees to cop a plea. Now, Parks was this guy Kaplan’s meal ticket, so he doesn’t want to see him put away. But he’s not about to cop a plea to save him, either. Instead, he and Philly came to an arrangement.”

  “What kind of arrangement?” I said.

  “Well CID isn’t exactly saying, but if you read between the lines it l
ooks like Phil got paid off—and I mean big money—in return for sitting on the Parks drug indictment and leaving Kaplan alone. Of course, now Philly’s claiming that it was all part of a plan, that he was taking Kaplan’s dough as evidence in a conspiracy to obstruct. But I don’t think CID is going for it. See, there was a fly in the ointment.”

  “C.W. O’Hara,” I said.

  “Right,” George said. “How’d you know? The girl gets a case of the guilts, goes down to the DA on her own, and offers to testify against Kaplan if they drop the drug charges against her man. Now the DA’s never heard of Kaplan or the Parks case. Philly hasn’t told him. As far as the DA knows, all he’s got on Parks is the New Year’s Eve assault. He starts to get curious, and notifies CID. Phil gets wind of the investigation, and things start happening. He knows he can’t play footsie with Kaplan anymore. That’s all over with. Instead, he approaches the girl, and he agrees to arrange immunity for Bill on both charges, if she promises to help him out.”

  “Help him out how?” I said.

  “She’s got to testify to the fact that Phil was the one who convinced her to go to the DA—that she’d been working with him all along. In other words, she’s going to help him cover his tracks. I guess the girl made the deal, because she was the one scheduled to testify on Friday. But Kaplan must have gotten wind of the fact that Philly was planning to sell him out. Nobody seems to know how Kaplan managed it, but you know what happened. The girl ended up dead.”

  I knew how he’d managed it, but I didn’t say anything. Instead, I played dumb, and asked George if there was any possibility that Kaplan himself had killed C.W.

  “No. Parks killed her. Forensic is certain of that. But it’s pretty obvious that Kaplan was an accessory before the fact. The question is, how did he get Parks to do it?”

  “What about all the stories Clayton fed to the papers about the Cougars helping make a deal for Parks, and about Parks being scheduled to testify?”

  “That was all a smoke screen,” DeVries said. “I mean, Phil had to come up with something reasonable-sounding to tell the press. And nobody at CID was sure enough of the facts to contest what he was saying. Now he says that he was just trying to buy time to throw Kaplan off the track, while he tried to put the case back together in a different way.”

  “How was he planning to do that?” I asked.

  “He says he had another witness lined up, someone who could testify against Kaplan. Some chippy who was a good friend of O’Hara’s and who knew Parks, too. But he was having trouble bringing the witness to hand. He claims he had her on a drug charge, but when he talked to her on Sunday morning she wouldn’t play ball. Apparently she wanted to be paid off in exchange for testifying. And now Phil claims she’s disappeared.”

  She hadn’t disappeared. She’d been murdered in a Newport apartment house, murdered in the act of attempting one last piece of extortion.

  I was almost astonished by how deftly she’d managed it. Laurel hadn’t been at the apartment when I’d come home with Bluerock on Sunday morning. I thought she’d been out shopping. I guess she had been, in a perverse way. Shopping for the highest bidder for her services. That was undoubtedly why she’d rendezvoused with Kaplan at the airport—to see how much he was willing to pay to keep her quiet. If so, it had been a mistaken piece of daring, and she’d paid for that mistake more horribly than she could have guessed. But Laurel had never lacked chutzpah. Nor had she ever disguised her greed.

  “I guess Phil’s only hope now is to find Bill and bring him back alive,” George said with a laugh. “He’s gone off after him, I know that. But even if he does make the case, he’s still going to have to explain all those deposits to his savings account. You know, the funny part is that the money probably came from Parks himself, from Kaplan’s cut of the contract. In fact, the theory is that that’s why Kaplan had talked Bill into renegotiating—to get a bigger nut to pay Philly off with. What a dumb fucker this Parks was, huh?”

  “Pretty damn dumb,” I said.

  “Well, I guess you can call the Cougars up and tell them not to worry now. There’ll be a retraction in the papers, as soon as Phil comes back to face the music. While you’re talking to them, you might mention the tickets.”

  I told him I would.

  “I guess that’s it,” George said. “Case closed.”

  Only it wasn’t quite closed—not for me.

  31

  I CALLED Petrie up after I finished with George. Bluerock listened in on the conversation so I wouldn’t have to explain it a second time.

  When I was done, Hugh breathed a sigh of relief. “So it’s all settled now.”

  “All settled,” I said.

  “And things can get back to normal. Call me in a couple of days, Harry. I’m going to arrange a bonus for you—you’ve earned it. And tell Bluerock that the deal we made is still on, if he changes his mind. I guess we owe him something too.”

  It wasn’t until I’d hung up the phone that I realized that he hadn’t even mentioned Parks. That the Grand Guignol fate Bill had inflicted on himself hadn’t even moved him to comment.

  Maybe he was just relieved to be out from under. Laurel’s murder had made the morning papers—with its tie-in to Bill. So that had probably been on his mind, too.

  I stared at Bluerock for a moment, and he stared back at me.

  “We’ve been fired,” I said.

  “Have we, now?”

  “And you’ve been invited back to training camp.”

  He nodded noncommittally. “But we’re not really done, yet, are we?”

  I shook my head. “No.”

  “I called his mother in Missoula last night. She made a big point of telling me she didn’t know where he was. I didn’t even have to ask. She also had a few unkind words for C.W., who according to her had gotten just what she deserved.”

  “I’ll bet,” I said. “Dr. Phillips told me that Bill had planned to visit Jewel last week. Bill seemed to think that going home would solve all his problems. Of course, that was before he found out about the baby and about C.W.”

  We looked at each other again. “Well . . .” he said.

  “You know what you’re getting into?”

  He nodded.

  “I know why I’m doing this,” I told him, as I started for the bedroom to pack a bag. “I can’t say I understand why you are. You know, he did do it, Blue. He did kill her. There’s no question about it anymore.”

  “Does it make a difference to you that the girl lied to you?” he said, giving me a sharp look.

  “That’s a different situation,” I said.

  “Why? ‘Cause you fucked her a few times? A friend’s a friend, Harry. You take them the way they are. And you don’t sell them out because they disappoint you. They’re going to kill Bill. You know it and I know it.”

  “They’re probably doing him a favor.”

  He sighed. “Probably. But that’s beside the point. Maybe he took the big dive. But he had somebody behind him all the way, pushing or prodding or selling a ticket.”

  He had a point. “Like you said, he was the football.”

  “He still is,” Otto said with feeling. “Somebody owes him a break, even if it’s just the chance to die in his own way.”

  “He may not get that chance, Blue,” I said. “If I find him, I’m turning him in. And you know what Walt has in mind.”

  He looked at me for a second. “Like I told you, we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.”

  ******

  By midafternoon we were jetting high over the Rockies. Bluerock had bought a pile of comic books at an airport newsstand and kept his nose buried in them throughout the flight. He’d managed to change clothes before we left, so he didn’t look quite as conspicuous as he had in the Hawaiian shirt. But there was no way that he wasn’t going to stick out, no matter what he had on.

  I tried to get some sleep during the flight, but I was too keyed up to relax. And then, every time I closed my eyes I saw Laurel lying on t
hat bloody bed, and I’d go cold with rage again.

  I knew that she’d invited disaster, that she had been toying with Kaplan the way she had toyed with Phil Clayton. The way she had toyed with me. She’d wanted to make a big score—that’s what she’d told me. But she hadn’t been quite pretty enough or lucky enough to do it the way that her friend C.W. had. So she’d made a place for herself on the fringe of the scene, eking out a living in the creases of that hard little world. She probably hadn’t thought that she was doing C.W. any harm, by keeping loose tabs on her for Kaplan. And unlike Stacey, she had done the right thing on Friday night, when everything had fallen apart. She had tried to help her friend, unaware that she herself had played a pivotal role in the tragedy. And when she’d come to on Saturday morning, with Clayton breathing down her neck and Kaplan on her trail and me painting her into a corner, I supposed that she’d decided she had to look out for herself. All I was offering her was a ticket out, and she had wanted more than that.

  Around seven we landed in Missoula. We’d transferred to a two-engine plane in Casper, and the last leg of the trip had left Bluerock looking as green as the shirt he was wearing.

  “Christ,” he said as we stepped out of the plane. “That was the worst flight I’ve ever been on.”

  “Any flight that doesn’t go down is a good flight,” I said to him, and patted the ground with my palm.

  We called a cab from the airport and had him drive us to a TraveLodge on Missoula’s main drag, Broadway. It wasn’t much of a street—or much of a town, from what I could see through the cab window. It was all drab, weatherbeaten brick and peeling aluminum siding—a brutally ugly, utilitarian place, like a mill town without the mill. It stretched out on a mountain valley floor, flat, fading, and brittle. All around it, in sharp contrast to the ugliness of the town itself, were lovely timbered foothills and blue mountain peaks. The Rattlesnake Mountains, the desk clerk at the motel told me.

  “Snow Bowl’s to the north—the way you came,” the man said affably, as if he figured us for summer skiers. He was a thin old man with a frail, friendly face, gold-rimmed glasses and a billowing white shirt that he’d once filled out fully, but which now hung around his withered torso like a lamp shade.