The Professional

by Robert B. Parker

  “Passed it on the way in, if you come from Boston,” Estevia said. “’Bout a hundred yards back, be on your right heading out. Kinda run-down, looks empty, but she’ll be in there.”

  I felt a chill. If Estevia thought it looked run-down . . .

  “Did you happen to know her daughter?” I said. “Beth?”

  “She run off long time ago, and no loss,” Estevia said.

  “No loss?”

  “Best she was gone, ’fore she dragged half the kids in town down with her.”

  “Bad girl?” I said.

  Estevia’s mouth became a thin, hard line. Her round face seemed to plane into angles.

  “Yes,” she said.

  “Bad how?” I said.

  “Just bad,” Estevia said.

  It was all I was going to get from Estevia.

  “Thank you for your time,” I said.

  Chapter53

  IT WAS A very small house. It not only looked empty, it looked like it should be empty. There wasn’t enough paint left on the front to indicate what color it might once have been. The roof-line was bowed. The windows were closed and dirty. Something that might once have been curtains hung in tattered disarray in the windows.

  I parked and went to the front door. There was no path shoveled. The uncut weeds of summer, now long dead, stuck up through the diminishing snow. There was no doorknob, and the hole where there had been one was plugged with a rag. I knocked. No one answered. I pushed on the door. It didn’t move. I’m not sure it was locked; it was more likely just warped shut.

  I went around to the side of the house and found what might be a kitchen door. There was a screen door and an inner door. The screening had torn loose and was curled up along one side. The inner door had a glass window that was so grimy, I couldn’t see through it. I knocked.

  From inside somebody croaked, “Go ’way.”

  It didn’t sound welcoming, but I figured the somebody didn’t really mean it, so I opened the inside door and stepped in. She looked like a huge sack of soiled laundry, slouched inertly at the kitchen table, drinking Pastene port wine from a small jelly glass with cartoon pictures on it. The table was covered with linoleum whose color and design were long since lost. There were pots and dishes in the soapstone sink, piles of newspapers and magazines in various corners. A small television with rabbit ears was playing jaggedly. The scripted conviviality and canned laughter was eerie in the desperate room. A black iron stove stood against the far wall, and the room reeked of kerosene and heat.

  “Mrs. Boudreau?” I said.

  “Go ’way,” she croaked again.

  She was very fat, wearing some sort of robe or housedress. It was hard to tell, and in truth, I didn’t look very closely.

  “My name is Spenser,” I said, and handed her a card. She didn’t take it, so I put it on the table.

  “You’re Elizabeth Boudreau’s mother,” I said.

  Her glass was empty. She picked up the bottle of port with both hands and carefully poured it into the jelly glass. She put the bottle down carefully, and picked up the glass carefully with both hands and sipped the port. Then she looked at me as if I hadn’t spoken.

  “Could you tell me a little about Elizabeth?” I said.

  “Elizabeth.”

  “Your daughter.”

  “Gone,” the woman said.

  “Elizabeth’s gone?”

  Mrs. Boudreau nodded.

  “Long time,” she said.

  “What can you tell me about her?” I said.

  “Bitch,” her mother said.

  I nodded. If Beth was thirty-six, this woman was probably sixty, maybe younger. She looked older than Angkor Wat.

  “Why bitch?” I said.

  “Whore.”

  This wasn’t going terribly well.

  “How about Mr. Boudreau?” I said.

  She drank port and stared at me.

  “He around?” I said.

  “No.”

  “Dead?”

  “Don’t know.”

  “Can you tell me anything about him?” I said.

  “Bastard,” she said.

  “Could you tell me where to find him?”

  “No.”

  I had hung around in this reeking trash bin as long as I could stand it. There was nothing I could find out that would be worth staying any longer.

  “Thank you,” I said, and turned and went out.

  I took in some big breaths as I walked to my car. The air felt clean.

  Chapter54

  BOLEY LABONTE OWNED a bowling alley and lounge called Kingpin Lanes, which sat in the middle of a big parking lot on South Tarbridge Road. There were two pickups and an old Buick sedan parked outside. Inside, four guys were bowling together. In the lounge three other guys were sitting at the bar, drinking beer and watching a woman with few clothes on dancing at a brass pole to music I neither recognized nor liked. It was two o’clock in the afternoon.

  I sat at the bar and ordered a beer. The bartender was a red-haired woman with an angular face and skin you could strike a match on.

  “Boley around?” I said.

  “Who wants to know?” the bartender said.

  I gave her my card, the understated one, where my name was not spelled out in bullet holes. She looked at it.

  “A freaking private eye?” she said.

  “Exactly,” I said.

  “Why you want to talk with Boley?”

  “None of your business,” I said.

  “Yeah, I guess not,” she said, and took the card and walked down to the end of the bar and ducked under, which was not easy given how tight her jeans were. She opened a door marked Office and went in; a moment later she came out and ducked back behind the bar.

  “Boley says he’ll be right out,” she said.

  I nodded and sipped my beer. The girl on the pole was a kid, maybe eighteen, nineteen, looking deadly serious, starting her long climb to stardom. A man came out of the office and walked down the bar and sat on the stool next to me.

  “How ya doin’,” he said. “I’m Boley LaBonte.”

  We shook hands.

  “I’m looking into a case involving Elizabeth Boudreau,” I said. “I understand you were married to her.”

  He had dark, curly hair, worn sort of long and brushed back. He had a thin mustache. His flowered shirt was unbuttoned to his sternum, showing a hairy chest and a gold chain. The material of the shirt stretched a little tight over his biceps.

  “That was a trip,” he said.

  “What can you tell me about her?” I said.

  “Jesus,” he said, and looked at the bartender. “Mavis, gimme a Coke.”

  She put it in front of him, and he drank some and looked at my beer bottle.

  “You okay?” he said.

  I said I was.

  “Beth Boudreau,” he said. “I heard she’s doing good.”

  “Married money,” I said.

  “Good for her,” Boley said. “You know anything about where she come from?”

  “I talked with her mother this morning,” I said.

  “Alberta?” Boley said. “She still alive?”

  “Sort of,” I said. “Is there a Mr. Boudreau?”

  “Nope,” Boley said. “Never was. Alberta got knocked up.”

  “Jesus,” I said.

  “Yeah,” Boley said. “Hard to think about.”

  I nodded.

  “Anyway,” Boley said. “Alberta Boudreau was always fat and homely, and my old man says never had a date. Then one day she comes up pregnant. It was a joke in town, Alberta was one for one, you know?”

  “Who was the father?”

  “Don’t know. Nobody seems to,” he said.

  He drank some more Coke.

  “This ain’t Boston,” he said. “Or Cambridge. Everybody’s like shocked back, what? Thirty-six years ago, something like that. But goddamn, Alberta has the kid. Everybody thought she had it to prove she’d gotten laid.”

  “Could be othe
r reasons,” I said.

  “Could be,” Boley said.

  He finished his Coke, and the bartender delivered a second one without being asked.

  “How they get along?” I said.

  “Beth and her mother?” Boley said. “Don’t know. Don’t know anybody was ever in the house.”

  “I was,” I said.

  Boley made a face.

  “I don’t want to know,” he said.

  “No,” I said. “You don’t. How about school. Beth catch any grief about all this in school?”

  “I dunno. I’m ten years older than her. But . . .” He drank some Coke. “You know how school is.”

  “I do,” I said. “How’d you meet her?”

  “She was working the pole here,” Boley said. “At the time, I’m the bouncer. Used to box a little—Golden Gloves and stuff.” He shrugged. “Good enough for here.”

  “And now you own it,” I said.

  “Yeah,” Boley said. “Guy owned it was a lush, he was going under. My old man died, left me a little insurance dough. I got it cheap.”

  “Great country,” I said.

  Boley was looking at me.

  “You used to fight,” he said. “Am I right?”

  “Yep.”

  “It’s the nose, mostly,” Boley said. “And around the eyes. Ever fight pro?”

  “Yep.”

  “Heavy?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “You good?” Boley said.

  “I was good,” I said. “Not great.”

  “So you was never gonna be champ,” Boley said.

  “No.”

  “But I bet you ain’t lost many on the street,” Boley said.

  “Not many,” I said.

  “Thing about boxing,” Boley said, “you know. You may not win, but you got a plan.”

  I nodded.

  “And,” Boley said, “when you box, you learn that getting hit ain’t the end of the fucking world.”

  I nodded again.

  “Just another day at the office,” I said.

  He grinned. We were quiet for a time, watching the girl making love to the brass pole.

  “Beth was like that kid,” Boley said. “She come here thinking she was a performer, you know? Thinking this was her ticket out of Palookaville.”

  “But it wasn’t,” I said.

  “Not from dancing,” he said.

  “You sleep with her?” I said.

  “Course,” Boley said. The bartender brought him another Coke. “Sleep with them all, part of the deal. I hire ’em to strip for the customers and fuck the owner.” He grinned. “Which is me.”

  “You sleeping with this kid?” I said.

  “Sure.”

  “How old is she?”

  “She’s eighteen,” Boley said. “Gotta be eighteen to do this, and I’m careful about that.”

  “Any of the dancers freelance with the clients?”

  “On their own time,” he said. “Not on mine. Don’t look like much now, but most nights we’re jumping. It’s a nice business for me. I’m not gonna hire anybody underage. I’m not gonna serve anybody underage. I’m not gonna allow no soliciting on my premises.”

  I nodded.

  “You still bouncing?” I said.

  He shook his head.

  “I hire it done now,” he said.

  “How was the marriage?”

  He shrugged.

  “She was hot enough,” he said. “And she tried to be nice to me. I mean, I was not only her husband, I was her income, you know?”

  “She still, ah, dance?”

  “No, I wouldn’t tolerate that when she was married to me.”

  “Propriety,” I said.

  “Whatever. But the thing I always knew was she didn’t like me. It was . . . she liked to fuck me, but she resented the rest of it. And man, did she have a temper. Come a point it would blow and she couldn’t control it.”

  “That why you divorced?” I said.

  “Nope.”

  “Why’d you divorce?” I said.

  “She was fucking other people,” he said. “I cut her loose.”

  I nodded.

  “You know where she went next?” I said.

  “Nope.”

  “You get married again?”

  “Yep. Nice woman. I didn’t meet her here. Two daughters. Nice house in Andover,” he said.

  “Your wife understand the arrangement with the strippers?” I said.

  Boley grinned at me.

  “Don’t ask,” he said. “Don’t tell.”

  The music stopped. The kid on the pole stopped dancing and, wearing only a G-string, walked unself-consciously off the stage.

  “At night the G-string goes,” Boley said. “But I ain’t wasting it in the middle of the afternoon on a couple shitkickers in down vests.”

  “It’s a hard life,” I said.

  “It is, and most of them are too stupid to do anything else,” he said.

  “Hard for Beth,” I said.

  “Hard for everybody,” Boley said. “You need to be tough if you’re gonna get anywhere.”

  “And smart,” I said.

  “Yeah,” Boley said. “That helps.”

  “You think Beth was smart?” I said.

  “She was tough, okay,” he said. “But she didn’t know much.”

  “You can be smart and not know much,” I said.

  He nodded and drank some Coke.

  “Smartest broad I ever fucked,” he said.

  And that in itself must be some kind of fame.

  Chapter55

  THIS ONE GOT Quirk’s interest. He stood with Belson and me, looking down at the body of Estelle, facedown near the edge of the Frog Pond in the Common.

  “According to the contents of her purse,” Belson said, “her name is Estelle Gallagher. And she works at Pinnacle, where she is a certified physical trainer.”

  “Appears to be the same Estelle,” I said.

  She had been shot by someone who had apparently put the gun right up against the back of her head. She’d been shot twice. The second time probably as she lay facedown on the ground. One of the bullets had exited her face somewhere in the area of her nose, and it rendered a visual ID problematic. The three of us looked down at her in the harsh light of the crime-scene lamps. It made everything bright enough so that the crime-scene people could scoot about with cameras and tape measures and brushes and powders, and various kits containing nothing I understood. Several Boston cops, of lesser rank than Quirk, were going over the area foot by foot.

  “Estelle Gallagher,” I said. “Never knew her last name.”

  “Don’t look Irish,” Quirk said.

  “No disgrace to it,” I said.

  “Not now,” Quirk said.

  He turned and walked to where a uniformed guy was standing with Gary and Beth. I followed him. Beth was holding on to Gary’s arm with both of hers. She was crying.

  “I’m sorry for your loss,” Quirk said.

  “It’s terrible,” Beth said.

  Gary looked dazed.

  “Do you have any thoughts on who or why?” Quirk said.

  “No,” Beth said, and cried some more.

  “You, sir?” Quirk said to Gary.

  He shook his head slowly.

  “No one had any reason to do this to Estelle,” he said.

  His voice was flat and not very loud. He looked as if Beth’s clutch on his arm was weighing him down.

  “She lived with you two,” Quirk said pleasantly.

  “Yes,” Beth said. “She was a friend.”

  “She was my girlfriend,” Gary said in the same affectless voice. “Been my girlfriend a long time.”

  Quirk didn’t say anything.

  “When’s the last time you saw her?” he said. “Either of you?”

  They looked at each other as if to compare notes.

  “This morning,” Gary said. Beth nodded. “Before she went to the club. I was having some breakfast with her. Beth was stil
l in, weren’t you?”

  “Yes,” she said, still sniffling. “But I heard you talking. I actually last saw her last night before I went to bed.”

  Quirk nodded and looked at Belson.

  “Frank,” he said. “We got a time of death yet?”

  “Nope.”

  “Okay, get a statement from these folks, and when the time of death is established, see if they got an alibi.”

  “Alibi?” Beth said. “You think one of us would do this?”

  “Course not,” Quirk said. “But it would be comforting to know you couldn’t have.”

  He jerked his head at me and walked away.

  When we were far enough away to talk, he said, “What’s this fucking threesome?”

  “You may have nailed it,” I said.

  “A fucking threesome?”

  “Yeah.”

  “And they all knew about each other?”

  “I think so,” I said.

  “I’m not sure any of the nuns at Saint Anthony’s told me about this,” he said.

  “Probably not,” I said.

  “First her husband, now her, ah, roommate. I was this Eisenhower guy, I’d be a little careful walking around with old Beth.”

  “Or she with him,” I said.

  “Or she with him,” Quirk said. “Tell me what you know.”

  Which I did.

  Chapter56

  WE IN A MARRIOTT HOTEL,” Hawk said. “In Burlington fucking Massachusetts.”

  We were in a new restaurant called Summer Winter.

  “Susan says it’s great,” I said.

  Susan smiled at him and nodded. Hawk looked around the room.

  “Don’t see no brothers,” Hawk said.

  “I know,” Susan said.

  They grinned at each other. Sometimes they communicated on levels even I didn’t quite get. Hawk looked at me.

  “What you know from the po-lice,” he said.

  “Gun killed Estelle was the same as the gun that killed Jackson,” I said.

  “Thing keeps getting more incestuous,” Hawk said. “Don’t it.”

  “It do,” I said.

  The waitress brought our drink order. She was pleasant to all of us. Though she was, perhaps, a little extra-pleasant to Hawk.

  Hawk sipped from his margarita.

  “Beth and Eisenhower got an alibi?” he said.