A Savage Place

by Robert B. Parker

  “Yeah. I get the idea.”

  “Pretty soon Summit Pictures and Oceania products were getting the edge in the marketplace, and Zifkind was making dough and Brewster was making dough, and Summit was making dough. Now and then some theater owner in Omaha would get roughed up, or a lumber wholesaler in Olympia, Washington, would have his warehouse burned, but that’s business, and everything seemed jake to everybody—except maybe the lumber wholesaler or the movie theater guy in Omaha—until Candy Sloan comes along.”

  On the silent TV screen Frederics had stopped speaking. The camera zoomed back and held for a long shot of the whole newsroom, then the screen went gray. I got up and turned it off.

  Samuelson kept on talking. “Some of this I picked up here and there—we been looking into this for a while ourselves. We picked Hammond up this afternoon—some of this I got from the two crooners downstairs. She talks to Felton, and Felton gets nervous and tells Hammond, and Hammond bucks it along to Brewster, and so forth, and eventually Franco Montenegro gets sent out to slap Sloan around a little and scare her off. They don’t want to burn a reporter if they can help it.”

  “I still don’t know why Franco burned Felton.”

  “Patience,” Samuelson said. “I’m getting to that. What me and you don’t know is that Felton has been the conduit for profits from Summit to Zifkind. And what nobody knows, including Brewster and Hammond and Zifkind, is that Felton is skimming. But Franco knew.”

  If I’d been a cartoon character, a light bulb would have appeared in a balloon above my head. “And Franco cut himself a piece,” I said.

  “Smart,” Samuelson said. “Smart eastern dude. You go to Haavahd?”

  “I have a friend who’s taking a course there,” I said.

  “Must rub off,” Samuelson said. Through the clear glass door of his office I could see a wall clock in the squad room. It said eleven thirty-eight. “So Felton and Franco are nibbling some vigorish of their own off the Mob’s vig. And nobody knows this.”

  “And when we got so close to Felton that he was sure to take the fall, Franco had to kill him,” I said. “ ’Cause if the Mob found out what they were doing, it—”

  Samuelson nodded. “Yes,” he said, “slow, painful and certain. The part I like is that Felton puts in a call to Franco to come bail him out and of course invited in his own killer.”

  “Franco was right,” I said. “Felton didn’t have the stuff. He’d have told everything he knew to everybody who asked him about thirty seconds after you got him in here.”

  “The thing is that what Sloan’s boyfriend—what’s his name?”

  “Rafferty,” I said, “Mickey Rafferty. But he wasn’t her boyfriend.”

  “What Rafferty saw when Felton gave Franco some dough wasn’t what they and you and me thought it was. It was just Franco’s private little gig with Felton. But it got the whole thing rolling, and it got Hammond scared and Brewster and, I suppose, eventually Ray Zifkind, but we’ll never get close to him.”

  “And Brewster,” I said. I felt as if I would never leave the chair I was in. As if I were slowly fossilizing, the living part of me dwindling deeper and deeper inside. All my energy was focused on listening to Samuelson. “Franco try to shake him down?”

  “Yep. Needed the dough, I suppose, to get out of here and away from Zifkind and us.”

  “And Brewster figured Candy was getting too close?” I said.

  “Yeah. He didn’t believe she was as taken with him as she acted.”

  “So he got Simms, and maybe somebody else—anybody else?”

  “Yeah, soldier named Little Joe Turcotte. We’re looking around for him now.”

  “So he got Simms and Little Joe to go out early and wait for Franco, and when Franco showed up, they gunned him. One of them used an automatic.”

  “Turcotte,” Samuelson said.

  “And they killed both of them while I was wandering around in the oil field.”

  “Don’t make you happy, I guess,” Samuelson said.

  “Nope. I haven’t been right since I got here.”

  “Can’t see how you could have done much better,” Samuelson said.

  I didn’t say anything.

  “She was going to keep at it,” Samuelson said. “No way you could have kept her from it.”

  “The thing is,” I said. My voice didn’t seem to be very closely connected to me. I paused and tried to think what I wanted to say. “The thing is,” I said, “that she did what she did because she didn’t want to be just another pretty face in the newsroom, you know. Just a broad that they used to dress up the broadcast. She wanted to prove something about herself and about being a woman, I guess, and what got her killed—when you come down to it—was, she thought she could use being female on Brewster. When it came down to it, she depended on—” I stopped again. I couldn’t think of the right phrase.

  “Feminine wiles,” Samuelson said.

  “Yeah,” I said. “Feminine wiles. And it got her killed.”

  Chapter 30

  The phone rang on Samuelson’s desk. The clock in the squad room said twelve twenty-five. I sat almost insentient while Samuelson listened to the phone. He said “Mmm” two, maybe three times, then listened some more. Then hung up without saying anything else.

  “D.A.’s office wants to prosecute you,” Samuelson said.

  I nodded.

  “Charges include resisting arrest, assault and battery on the Oceania security people, and being a bush-league fucking hot dog.”

  “They been talking to your chief of detectives,” I said.

  “They were toying with a kidnapping charge, but since the two guys you held were murder suspects, they don’t think it will stand up. But they also got some new hostage laws they want to try out, and they’ll probably charge you under one of them.”

  “Good chance for them to practice,” I said.

  “Yeah.”

  We were quiet. The squad room behind us was nearly empty. Samuelson rubbed the back of his neck with his right hand.

  “They want me to bring you down and book you.”

  The air conditioner under the window behind Samuelson cycled on with a small thump and a sound of air blowing.

  “You got an airline ticket?” Samuelson said.

  “In my wallet.”

  “Okay,” he said. “Let’s go.”

  We went out of his office. He shut off the lights and closed the door carefully behind him. We walked through the squad room and out of the corridor and took the elevator down to the first floor.

  “This way,” Samuelson said.

  We walked out the front door and down the steps. The rain had stopped but the dampness still hung in the air. The night was hot and steamy. And you knew it would rain again soon. We walked around the corner and got into an unmarked Chevy sedan. Samuelson drove. We went onto the Harbor Freeway and headed south.

  I had my head back against the seat, almost asleep.

  “You going to book me in Long Beach?” I asked.

  “No.”

  We turned off the Harbor Freeway at the Santa Monica Freeway and went west.

  There was no traffic and Samuelson drove fast. In a few minutes we were in West L.A. We turned off the Santa Monica and onto the San Diego Freeway around a big involute cloverleaf. We went south toward the airport.

  It was ten of one when Samuelson headed down Century Boulevard toward the L.A. airport.

  “What airline you got a ticket for?” he said.

  “American.”

  The airport was brilliantly lighted, the lighting making an orange-yellow blur in the mist that seemed to hover over it about twenty feet up. It had the feel of a bright emptiness that a shopping mall has after hours. A single yellow cab rolled past us, going toward L.A. Two airline types in uniform waited at a bus stop in front of the international terminal.

  Samuelson parked in front of American and we went in. There was a flight at 1:20 for Dallas/Fort Worth that connected for Boston. It was boarding a
t Gate 46. Samuelson showed his badge to the cop at the security check, and they didn’t make a fuss when the metal detector buzzed at Samuelson’s gun. Mine was back somewhere in a drawer at the homicide bureau.

  At Gate 46 Samuelson said to me, “Get on. Go to Boston. When it’s time to testify, I want you back.”

  “I thought you were supposed to book me,” I said.

  “You escaped as I was bringing you down,” Samuelson said.

  “This won’t get you promoted to captain,” I said.

  “I flunked the captain’s exam twice already,” Samuelson said. “Just be sure to come back when it’s time to testify.”

  “I’ll come back,” I said.

  “Yeah,” Samuelson said. “I know.”

  I was swaying slightly as we stood there. It was one fifteen. I put out my hand. Samuelson shook it.

  “You did what you could for that broad, Spenser,” Samuelson said. “Including what you did at Oceania afterward.”

  I nodded.

  “D.A. don’t understand that,” Samuelson said. “Neither does the chief.”

  I nodded again.

  Samuelson said, “Nobody’s perfect.”

  “That’s for goddamn certain,” I said.

  I was asleep in my seat before we took off. Except for a half-conscious plane change in Dallas I slept straight through to Boston and dreamed of Susan Silverman all the way home.

  Spenser’s looking for a girl and finding trouble. You’ll want to read the whole story in CEREMONY, available from Dell.

  I pushed toward the dark booths along the right-hand wall. In the second one I found Red. I slid into the booth. His face was white and fat with puffy cheeks. There was some sweat on his upper lip. I showed him my picture of April Kyle. He looked at it and handed it back. “So,” he said. His voice was very soft, hard to hear in the noisy room.

  “Know her?” I said.

  “Know a hundred like her,” he said.

  “I don’t want a hundred like her,” I said. “I’m looking for her.”

  “I heard you were,” he said.

  We were quiet. Red looked past me. I looked up. Trumps was there and behind him two other black men. Trump’s coat was unbuttoned.

  I looked at Red. “He the one you heard it from?”

  Red nodded.

  Trumps said, “Get out of the booth, man. You got some things to learn.”

  One of the men behind Trumps, a tall man with very square high shoulders, showed me a gun. He held it low, concealed from the room by his body. A Beretta.

  “Come on, smart ass,” Trumps said. “We going someplace and see how tough you are.”

  “You can find that out right now,” I said. “I’m tough enough not to go.”

  “Okay, motherfucker, then we’ll do it here,” Trumps said. He brought out a spring knife and snapped it open. Behind him Hawk appeared and banged together the heads of his two helpers. It sounded like a bat hitting a baseball. Trumps half turned. I caught his knife hand and yanked him toward me, turning the knife away as I did. I put my left hand behind the elbow of his knife arm and bent the arm backward. He grunted with pain. The knife clattered out of his hand onto the table. I pushed him away, picked up the knife, and folded the blade back into the handle. Trumps caught his balance with one hand on the back of the booth and stared at Hawk.

  Hawk smiled at him that pleasant, unfeeling smile. “Evening, Trumps.”

  “Before you go,” I said to Trumps. “Have you seen that girl I was looking for?”

  Trumps didn’t look at me. He looked at Hawk the way his whore had looked at him. “She’s one of Red’s,” Trumps said. “She work for Red.”

  Trumps and his helpers left. Hawk slid into the booth beside Red. There was more sweat on Red’s upper lip, I thought.

  “Not too many people hassle Trumps,” Red said.

  “It’s time they started,” I said. “Where’s the girl?”

  Red looked at Hawk beside him. Hawk smiled. Red looked back at me. “I ain’t scared of you,” he said. He jerked his head at Hawk. “Him either.”

  Without changing his expression Hawk hit Red across the throat with his left hand. Red gasped and rocked back against the booth.

  “Soon as you can talk,” he said, “tell Spenser where to find the girl.”

  We sat quietly, listening to the harsh music. Red was rocking back and forth, both hands clutching his throat. Twice he started to speak and nothing came out. Finally he said in a soft croak, “Three Eighteen and a half. Three Eighteen and a half Chandler Street. Apartment Three B.”

  Hawk and I got up.

  “Shoulda been scared,” Hawk said.

  For Joan,

  No one is as interesting,

  nor nearly so luminous

  Books by Robert B. Parker from Dell

  ALL OUR YESTERDAYS

  CRIMSON JOY

  PALE KINGS AND PRINCES

  TAMING A SEA-HORSE

  A CATSKILL EAGLE

  VALEDICTION

  LOVE AND GLORY

  THE WIDENING GYRE

  CEREMONY

  A SAVAGE PLACE

  EARLY AUTUMN

  LOOKING FOR RACHEL WALLACE

  WILDERNESS

  THE JUDAS GOAT

  PROMISED LAND

  MORTAL STAKES

  GOD SAVE THE CHILD

  THE GODWULF MANUSCRIPT